Women with supportive, well-off fathers often are often at the forefront of women’s rights in conservative nations, because they have the means. One such woman has shocked Egypt by filing a paternity suit against a well-known actor. Because it involves a woman fighting injustice before marriage, losing her privacy and being publicly vilified, it reminds me of the dowry extortion case in Delhi:
The standard three-step program for any unmarried upper-class Egyptian girl who becomes pregnant is an abortion, an operation to refurbish her virginity with a new hymen and then marriage to the first unwitting suitor the family can snare… Instead [Hind el-Hinnawy] did the unthinkable here: she had the child and then filed a public paternity suit… Ms. Hinnawy contends that the two had what is known as an urfi [unregistered] marriage… She may well set an Egyptian legal precedent by requesting that the court order Mr. Fishawy to submit to a DNA test…Corporate tycoons and politicians who are married have found urfi marriages a convenient means to carry on affairs with everyone from secretaries to belly dancers with an Islamic seal of approval… “People prefer that a woman live a psychologically troubled life; that doesn’t matter as long as it doesn’t become a scandal…”
… the case would help defeat the conservative Saudi values that she said had changed Egyptian society for the worse… “These values from Wahhabi Islam are completely different from our Islamic values,” Mrs. Bakr said. “This is petrodollar Islam…” [NYT]
The 2003 Nisha Sharma case in Noida:
Just a couple of hours before her wedding ceremony, Ms Nisha Sharma used her mobile phone to report her in-laws-to-be to the police. They had allegedly demanded Rs 12 lakh from Ms Sharma’s father, and had even assaulted him when he had hesitated to comply with the demand…
There is only a difference of degree, and not of kind, between murdering a woman for not bringing in enough money or things into her husband’s family, and putting pressure on her parents to ensure that the wedding is an adequate expression of how much they love their daughter. The magic of these pressures lies in the extent to which they are internalized by the bride and her parents, sparing the groom and his family from actually having to make these demands in so many words. [Telegraph]
El-Hinnawy is a costume designer, Sharma a software engineering student. Sharma became a cause celebre and eventually married someone else. More on the Sharma case: BBC, Telegraph
