This shocking image reveals as starkly as any could that the struggle in Egypt is not yet over. It was taken over the weekend and shows a young woman being dragged away from protests in Tahrir Square on the third day of clashes between the Egyptian military and protesters demanding that Egypt’s military rulers give up power – protests that have left 14 dead. Tonight The UN’s human rights chief, Navi Pillay, has called for the arrest and prosecution of members of the Egyptian security forces involved in the crackdown on protesters.
Since the Egyptian uprising began back in the spring, the Egyptian novelist Ahdaf Soueif has been reporting from Cairo as events unfold in a series of despatches to The Guardian. She and other members of her family have been active in the protests. Today her report concerns this photograph. She writes:
The woman is young, and slim, and fair. She lies on her back surrounded by four soldiers, two of whom are dragging her by the arms raised above her head. She’s unresisting – maybe she’s fainted; we can’t tell because we can’t see her face. She’s wearing blue jeans and trainers. But her top half is bare: we can see her torso, her tummy, her blue bra, her bare delicate arms. Surrounding this top half, forming a kind of black halo around it, is the abaya, the robe she was wearing that has been ripped off and that tells us that she was wearing a hijab.
She continues:
Now our revolution is in an endgame struggle with the old regime and the military. The young woman is part of this. Since Friday the military has openly engaged with civilian protesters in the heart of the capital. The protesters have been peacefully conducting a sit-in in Ministries’ Street to signal their rejection of the military’s appointment of Kamal Ganzouri as prime minister. […]
They dragged the unconscious young woman in the blue jeans – with her upper half stripped – through the streets.
The message is: everything you rose up against is here, is worse. Don’t put your hopes in the revolution or parliament. We are the regime and we’re back.
What they are not taking into account is that everybody’s grown up – the weapon of shame can no longer be used against women. When they subjected young women to virginity tests one of them got up and sued them. Every young woman they’ve brutalized recently has given video testimony and is totally committed to continuing the struggle against them.
The young woman in the blue jeans has chosen so far to retain her privacy. But her image has already become icon. As the tortured face of Khaled Said broke any credibility the ministry of the interior might have had, so the young woman in the blue jeans has destroyed the military’s reputation.
Ahdaf Soueif is the author of the bestselling The Map of Love which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize for Fiction in 1999. She is also a political and cultural commentator: a collection of her essays, Mezzaterra: Fragments from the Common Ground, was published in 2004. She has a new book Cairo: My City, Our Revolution published in January 2012.
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