[Originally posted at NOW Lebanon]
In a shameful effort to appease the country’s muscular new Salafist bloc, Egypt’s prosecutor-general ordered yesterday the implementation of a 2009 court order banning access to pornographic websites.
As Islamists rejoiced (MP Ali Wanis, for example, hailing this “first step towards applying Islamic Law in Egypt”), the apparent liberal response was to see the move either as a threat to free speech or as an eccentric but basically benign distraction from the more urgent tasks of creating jobs and battling corruption.
It is those things, to be sure, but it’s also something much more dangerous. No one who has lived, as I have, in a country that bans pornography (the UAE in my case) can have failed to observe the warping effects of this kind of deprivation. It’s a fairly well-established rule that the more a thing is prohibited, the more people will want it, and the cause-and-effect mechanism in this context can manifest itself in very ugly ways.
Unable to see feminine flesh second-hand in the privacy of their homes, frustrated men will find themselves inclined to search for the real thing in public. I can’t statistically prove the link between sexual prohibition and sexual assault (largely because what little data do exist on the UAE are compromised by the substantial underreporting of rape; fuelled in turn by a “justice” system that imprisons and even lashes the victims themselves – a separate scandal altogether), but Cairo already has quite a reputation for the latter, and I see no case for believing this new law will lessen that. (Though an ingenious new campaign to brand the city’s gropers and grabbers with a spray-paint stencil declaring “I’m a harasser” seems more promising.)
More generally, if the Gulf countries have anything to teach Egyptians, it’s that transforming a liberal society into an Islamist one is much like cooking an egg into an omelet: a process not easily reversed.
In a shameful effort to appease the country’s muscular new Salafist bloc, Egypt’s prosecutor-general ordered yesterday the implementation of a 2009 court order banning access to pornographic websites.
As Islamists rejoiced (MP Ali Wanis, for example, hailing this “first step towards applying Islamic Law in Egypt”), the apparent liberal response was to see the move either as a threat to free speech or as an eccentric but basically benign distraction from the more urgent tasks of creating jobs and battling corruption.
It is those things, to be sure, but it’s also something much more dangerous. No one who has lived, as I have, in a country that bans pornography (the UAE in my case) can have failed to observe the warping effects of this kind of deprivation. It’s a fairly well-established rule that the more a thing is prohibited, the more people will want it, and the cause-and-effect mechanism in this context can manifest itself in very ugly ways.
Unable to see feminine flesh second-hand in the privacy of their homes, frustrated men will find themselves inclined to search for the real thing in public. I can’t statistically prove the link between sexual prohibition and sexual assault (largely because what little data do exist on the UAE are compromised by the substantial underreporting of rape; fuelled in turn by a “justice” system that imprisons and even lashes the victims themselves – a separate scandal altogether), but Cairo already has quite a reputation for the latter, and I see no case for believing this new law will lessen that. (Though an ingenious new campaign to brand the city’s gropers and grabbers with a spray-paint stencil declaring “I’m a harasser” seems more promising.)
More generally, if the Gulf countries have anything to teach Egyptians, it’s that transforming a liberal society into an Islamist one is much like cooking an egg into an omelet: a process not easily reversed.
No comments:
Post a Comment