Egyptian Women

Upon reading John Daniszewski's article, "Egyptian Woman Scarred by Hate" (May 3), I was outraged. It was, of course, the plight of these women that originally angered me. My outrage came, however, when I read the words of Ahmed Magdoub, a professor at the National Center for Sociological and Criminal Research: "To prevent these crimes, mothers should teach their sons that women have the right to reject men, as men have the right to reject woman, and...

Muslim stereotypes in the West grow out of a long historical tradition of anxiety about Islam. In the Middle Ages, anti-Islamic polemics were motivated not only by the fear that Islam's armies might advance into the heart of Europe, but by the concern that its far superior civilization would take over the continent. In the 19th Century, portrayals of the Muslims as barbarians were motivated by the need to justify Europe's colonial subjugation of their lands and exploitation of their resources.

Nadia was left in the middle of Cairo's sweltering suburbs at the age of 35 when her husband, despairing of a good job in Egypt, went to find work in the oil-rich Persian Gulf. She stayed home with the children, and gradually the only thing left of her husband was an occasional check in the mail. Bored and lonely, Nadia started inviting a local taxi driver home for cups of tea.

Dressed in karate uniforms and track suits, the young women break off in pairs and begin sparring, with one kicking and punching while the other tries to block the attacks. The nearly two dozen women and girls gathered in a small gymnasium in this city of 1 million north of Cairo are learning to fight off assailants -- a rarity for most women in the Arab world. Such self-defense classes have popped up in the last year across Egypt as the conservative Muslim country for the first time turns major attention to the issue of sexual harassment.

As many as 200 women burned Israeli flags and shouted slogans Sunday in the latest in a series of Egyptian protests against Israel's clampdown on Palestinians in the occupied territories, witnesses said. Witnesses said that from 100 to 200 women--members of the small, pro-Moscow Nationalist Unionist Progressive Rally--staged a two-hour sit-in at the party's Cairo office.

It is 1:30 in the morning at the packed Al Rashid nightclub, and the scene is "Arabian Nights" crossed with Studio 54. A private nurse wearing an Islamic veil attends to a heavyset Saudi man in robe and kaffiyeh, giving him an injection at his stage-side table. Some women in the audience are in full hejab, covered in black scarves, veils and robes. Others drip diamonds from their ears and necks.

Two weeks after they met, the 17-year-old Egyptian girl and the wealthy Saudi businessman were married. A month later, the husband returned to Saudi Arabia, leaving the young woman abandoned and pregnant. One more marriage that masked little more than the sale of a girl to a tourist had begun and ended. In this business, activists say, young women are objects for the amusement of the wealthy, for lawyers who act as middlemen and for families who collect "dowries" to escape poverty.

She was leaving the bus when the driver touched her in a way a stranger shouldn't. "I screamed at him, 'You're an animal!' " said Shaimaa Abdel Rahman Aref, a 28-year-old graduate business student. "I felt as if he was striking at my pride. I wish he had beaten me instead. It would have been much less humiliating, especially that I was veiled and not wearing anything that would arouse a man." Aref took down the bus number and went to the police.

From the day they pulled him off the pavement, Paul Sigler, a haunted-looking man with striking pale blue eyes, presented a mystery to Carrie Bach's team. He wasn't like the rest of the skid row crowd, he insisted. "I used to be a millionaire," he muttered. "I fell off the Empire State Building. They just fell off the curb." Bach, director of Los Angeles County's effort to shelter skid row's 50 most vulnerable homeless, knew that facades were deceptive in a population of wily hustlers and mentally ill dope fiends.