By Emily Esfahani Smith
Aliaa Maghda El-Mahdy, a 20-year-old dissident from Cairo, describes herself as a “secular liberal feminist vegetarian individualist Egyptian.” A college student, an atheist, and a blogger, she may seem like just another attention-seeking political activist. But her latest act of political rebellion has set off a firestorm in Egypt and in the Twitterverse of Arab dissidents.
In one of the nude self-portraits she posted this week on her blog, A Rebel’s Diary (warning: X-rated), which has received more than a million page views, she faces the camera wearing no more than a red ribbon in her hair, thigh-high tights, and red ballet flats. Mahdy’s photo, which shows one of her feet propped on a stool and a flash of defiance in her eyes, is erotic. “I took my nude photo myself in my parents’ home,” she writes.
Aliaa Maghda El-Mahdy, a
20-year-old dissident from Cairo, describes herself as a “secular
liberal feminist vegetarian individualist Egyptian.” A college student,
an atheist, and a blogger, she may seem like just another
attention-seeking political activist. But her latest act of political
rebellion has set off a firestorm in Egypt and in the Twitterverse of Arab dissidents.
In one of the nude self-portraits she posted this week on her blog, A Rebel’s Diary
(warning: X-rated), which has received more than a million page views,
she faces the camera wearing no more than a red ribbon in her hair,
thigh-high tights, and red ballet flats. Mahdy’s photo, which shows one
of her feet propped on a stool and a flash of defiance in her eyes, is
erotic. “I took my nude photo myself in my parents’ home,” she writes.
The same photo appears on her blog a second time, now with a yellow
rectangle covering her crotch. “The yellow rectangles on my eyes, mouth
and sex organ resemble the censoring of our knowledge, expression and
sexuality,” she writes.
Although many in the West have been desensitized to images of female nudity,
particularly online, Mahdy’s rebellious act shocked and scandalized a
whole range of people in Egypt, from devout Muslims to members of the
youth movement. According to the website cyberdissidents.org,
she has received thousands of “threatening comments” since the
publication of the nude photos, the purpose of which was “challenging
her community to restrict her freedom.”
Mahdy doesn’t care. “I have the
right to live freely in any place,” she writes on her blog. She is using
all the weapons in her arsenal to protest “a society of violence,
racism, sexism, sexual harassment and hypocrisy.” A staunch critic of
Islamic extremism and the puritanical censorship that accompanies it,
she is advocating a “freedom revolution” in Egypt, just as the
pro-freedom forces of the Arab Spring are being overwhelmed by staunch Islamists. According to one report, the foxy feminist supports a Facebook group called “Men Should Wear the Veil.”
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