Why Do They Hate Us?

A culture hacker has to be fearless. Where does Mona's fearlessness come from? One searing event in her past was during the 2011 protests in Tahrir Square. Thousands of Egyptians gathered in this Square for eighteen days to proclaim people power and actually succeeded in bringing down the government. This was a moment of great triumph for many Egyptians, Mona among them. However, it was also an occasion for violation of her being: Mona was physically and sexually assaulted by riot police while fighting for what she thought was freedom. "Most people detained the same week I was taken in ended up at a police station or jail, but for some reason I was taken to the interior ministry and was then handed over to military intelligence for almost 12 hours. The sexual assault couldn't have lasted more than a few minutes, but the psychic bruise remains the freshest."

A year after the incident, she published her first essay “Why Do They Hate Us?” where she throws stunning facts about how women are consistently controlled by men in the Arab-Muslim world. The essay didn't quite provide the answers to her question until it expanded into the book, Headscarves and Hymens. "We Arab women live in a culture that is fundamentally hostile to us, enforced by men's contempt. They don't hate us because of our freedoms, as the tired post-9/11 American cliché had it. We have no freedoms because they hate us."

Mona's explanation of male violence against women in the Arab world has not won her popularity amongst her own people. That is because, generally speaking, we are taught to swallow our opinion and remain subdued in a man's presence, and definitely, among large groups of men. In her critical stance against the reigning gendered norms of her society, Mona has chosen to be culturally deviant.