International Shia News Agency
AfricaAll NewsFeatured 1Human rightsMiddle EastNEWS BRIEFSOther News

Al-Azhar: harassment of women is religiously forbidden and should be punished

SHAFAQNA– Egypt’s top Sunni Muslim authority, Al-Azhar, has issued a statement expressing harassment of women is religiously forbidden and should be punished ‘regardless of the context or conditions’.

Al-Azhar, which has huge influence over Egypt’s mostly Muslim population and trains most of the country’s imams, took to Facebook and Twitter this week to denounce the practice of harassing women, including over their behaviour or clothing.

In the statement published yesterday, Al-Azhar condemns “prohibited acts and deviant behavior”. It also affirms that “women’s attire or attitude should under no circumstances justify these acts” which constitute an “attack on the dignity and freedom of women”. And he adds: “He who practices these harassments is a sinner”. The Islamic institution asks the authorities to “enforce the law that criminalizes these acts” and “to punish the guilty”. The edict follows a law adopted in 2014 that criminalizes sexual harassment, Asia News reported.

The institution’s remarks come days after a man was killed in the Egyptian Mediterranean city of Alexandria allegedly while defending his wife against harassment. The city’s police arrested the 39-year-old suspect purportedly for having fatally stabbed the woman’s husband at a beach this week. The incident triggered an outcry in Egypt.

In recent years, Egyptian authorities and civil society groups have stepped up efforts to combat the offence. Under recent legal amendments, sexual harassment in Egypt is punishable by jail terms of up to 10 years.

Egyptian courts have recently issued tough jail sentences in different cases of sex assaults. The verdicts were passed following a short number of hearings. Previously, such cases took long years before a ruling was delivered, gulfnews reported.

Accourding to Middle East Eye, in 2014, Egypt passed a law punishing harassment with up to five years in jail. But the law is rarely put into action, according to Human Rights Watch.

“Sexual harassment and violence against women remained endemic,” the rights group said in a report earlier this year. “Women police officers, part of a special unit started in 2013 to combat violence against women, became more visible in public places especially during crowded holidays. But prosecution of perpetrators was still rare.”

Egypt jailed a Lebanese tourist in July for posting a video on social media complaining about the sexual harassment she endured in the country.

As Egyptian regime clearly punished women who expose sexual harassment, and does little to nothing to punish predators, the highest Sunni Islamic authority – al-Azhar – has said street sexual harassment is a sin, and cannot be “justified” or “excused” by what the woman was wearing.

Some 60 percent of women in Egypt said they had been victims of some form of sexual harassment during their lifetimes in a 2017 report from UN Women and Promundo. Three-quarters of men and 84 percent of women polled said that women who “dress provocatively deserve to be harassed”.

Activist Lobna Darwish said the al-Azhar statement would create debate around the issue, even if it did not immediately change minds.

“They have the ability to promote this language against sexual harassment everywhere in Egypt … So they can at least change part of the culture,” she told the Thomson Reuters Foundation by phone from Cairo. “We hope this is a new beginning or a step, a decision, a political commitment to working on sexual harassment,” said Darwish, gender and women’s rights officer for the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights.

Cairo was named most dangerous megacity for women in an international perception poll carried out by the Thomson Reuters Foundation last year.

Women’s rights experts said the treatment of women in the Egyptian capital had worsened since a 2011 uprising seeking social change, with harassment a daily occurrence.

According to the cairo review, during the eighteen days of mass mobilization in Egypt beginning on January 25, 2011, women faced no threats in public space due to gender. Media carried images of women and girls of all ages, social classes, religious beliefs, and dress codes, demanding change side-by-side with men and boys in Tahrir Square and in governorates across the country.

These images carried around the world seemed to symbolize the positive changes occurring in the Middle East. The square was devoid of discrimination or oppression, with respect to gender as well as other differences that normally divide the population; instead, it was filled with a genuine call for change, expressing the value of universal citizenship. An outpouring of triumph and hope occurred as Egypt had not witnessed in a very long time. This phase of social cohesion and collaboration ended on February 11, 2011 when President Hosni Mubarak resigned after three decades in power.

And then came a sudden turn with the emergence of haunting images of women being sexually assaulted in Tahrir Square and other public places. The assault on reporter Lara Logan from the CBS television network made headlines around the world and the gang rape and mob sexual assault perpetrated against Egyptian women became an enduring feature of the Tahrir protests. The gender-based violence cast a pall on political developments to follow, and shaped some of the current of change in Egypt.

Suad Abu-Dayyeh, a Middle East expert with global advocacy group Equality Now, said it was “significant that al-Azhar has denounced sexual harassment because people in Egypt, or in our region, depend so much on the religious scholars”.

But she said both government and civil society needed to do more to change people’s views on how women should be treated, Reuters reported.

Related posts

What is the Fast of the Month of Ramadhan?

parniani

Egypt to suspend daily power cuts during Ramadhan

leila yazdani

Egypt sign 7 green energy agreements with international developers

leila yazdani

17 Egyptian women featured in ‘Forbes Middle East’s Top 100 Businesswomen 2024’ list

nafiseh yazdani

RT: Egypt ditching USA’s dollar for trade

nafiseh yazdani

Daily Sabah: Turkish President arrives in Egypt after a decade

leila yazdani

Leave a Comment