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
This article, which appeared on the front page of the Washington Post, discusses Nisha Sharma and the death of Charanpreet Kaur:
You can study history, anthropology, and gender roles throughout history, but sometimes I still don’t know what makes certain men and their families feel that, through marriage, they gain certain rights over a woman’s person and that she retains few or none of them. Someone in my circle of acquaintances did something awful. He and his family didn’t set her on fire, thankfully, but they still stomped all over her emotionally and sometimes physically. This man had a daughter with a woman about 10 or 11 years ago. 4 or 5 years ago, he went to India, got married to a different woman. The woman was never told about his daughter or any of his ahem previous indiscretions. She found out about his daughter some time after she arrived in the U.S. They lived with his family. He hit her on a few occasions and often emotionally abused her. She had no family in the area and his parents kept her on lockdown. She wasn’t allowed to work. She ran off to some family in a different part of the States for some time. They tried making things work when she came back but it was still the same story. She wanted a divorce. She tried to settle it amicably with him and his family, but they refused to hand over a dime or any help at all. They talked smack about her to anyone who would listen and got a lot of his extended family involved. When she saw they wouldn’t budge, she went to court. Then all of a sudden his parents did a 180 and told her she was like their own daughter and tried to be super friendly and couldn’t they just work things out? And while they were pretending to be nice to her, they guy’s mother was already looking for another wife in India for him. Anyhow, the divorce went through, and the family was compelled to pay a certain amount to the woman. She’s taking classes right now and working to build her own life again. The guy? He’s married again, waiting for his wife to get here from India.
And I wanted to point out, that she was able to finally leave him with the help of various South Asian women’s group like Manvi and Sakhi. (I think those are their names.) If you ever have any trouble like that yourself, or know someone else who’s in a position like that – I would definitely refer them to one of these groups. If there isn’t a chapter near them, then they’ll be able to refer you or your friend to someone near enough to you who can help.