RUTHFULLY YOURS

If you are cursed to be born a girl in Egypt, there is a 90% chance you will have your genitals cut in the name of purity. In Yemen, there is a 55% chance you will never learn to read and a 79% chance you will never work. And in the United Arab Emirates, your father or husband can beat you and remain fully compliant with the law so long as he leaves no mark.

Yet Muslim women who decry this appalling reality are often branded traitors to their culture and handmaidens to the imperialist forces of Dick Cheney. Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Irshad Manji and Asra Nomani have all been dismissed as attention-seeking contrarians or unsophisticated bigots who perpetuate stereotypes about Muslims and the Arab world.

The Egyptian writer Mona Eltahawy became the object of such criticism in 2012, when she decried Arab societies that treat “half of humanity like animals” in an article for Foreign Policy magazine. “When it comes to the status of women in the Middle East, it’s not better than you think. It’s much, much worse.”

ENLARGE

She has now expanded that article into a book, “Headscarves and Hymens: Why the Middle East Needs a Sexual Revolution,” which blends her own story—an ideological journey toward feminism while growing up in Egypt, England and Saudi Arabia—with a sweeping portrait of what life is like for women in the Middle East. The same righteous anger that propelled her essay fuels her book. It’s easy to see why she’s so incensed.

Born in Port Said, Egypt, Ms. Eltahawy lived in London for almost a decade while her mother and father earned Ph.D.s in medicine. In 1982, both parents got jobs teaching clinical microbiology in Jeddah. It was there, she writes, that she was “traumatized into feminism—there’s no other way to describe it—because to be a female in Saudi Arabia is to be the walking embodiment of sin.”

Women, Ms. Eltahawy learned quickly, are in perpetual danger in the kingdom. During a family pilgrimage to Mecca her first year in the country, the teenage author was assaulted twice. While she was circling the Ka’ba, a man repeatedly grabbed her from behind: “I burst into tears, because that is all I could do. I did not have it in me to tell my parents the truth, so I told them the crowds were getting to me.” Later, a policeman groped her breast at Islam’s holiest site. “I came to learn during my years in Saudi Arabia and then in Egypt that this was how most men did it. That’s how they got at your body—so surreptitiously that you ended up questioning your own sense of having been violated.”

Like teenage girls in the West who “take refuge in baggy clothing,” Ms. Eltahawy began to cover her hair all the time. “I needed something to defend me,” she writes of the wandering hands and eyes of Saudi men, “and I thought the hijab would.” It didn’t.

Turn to any page of “Headscarves and Hymens” and you’ll find a statistic or anecdote to make your blood boil. I won’t soon forget the story of Rawan, an 8-year-old Yemeni girl who died of internal bleeding on her “wedding” night, or of Manal Assi, a 33-year-old Lebanese schoolteacher beaten to death with a pressure cooker by her husband. Mercifully, we also hear about heroic women like Genet Girma, who, during her 2002 wedding in Kembata, Ethiopia, wore a placard reading: “I am not circumcised, learn from me.” Her husband wore his own: “I am very happy to be marrying an uncircumcised woman.”

Ms. Eltahawy makes an irrefutable case that there is a cancer in the Middle East, but she has little to suggest in terms of cures. She rightly criticizes Westerners who let their “respect” for other cultures trump their defense of basic human rights. “Cultural relativism is as much my enemy as the oppression I fight within my culture and faith.” But on the very next page she writes: “When I travel and give lectures abroad and I’m asked how best to help women in my part of the world, I say, help your own community’s women fight misogyny. By doing so, you help the global struggle against the hatred of women.” How will complaining about the pay gap in Manhattan help women subjected to humiliating virginity tests in Cairo or rape victims forced to marry their attackers in Jordan? Such false moral equivalences may allow Ms. Eltahawy to distance herself from advocates like Ayaan Hirsi Ali who don’t hesitate to say that the real war on women is being waged by Islamists—not Republicans.

Ms. Eltahawy also tries to have it both ways when it comes to Islam’s teachings about women. “We are in denial,” she writes trenchantly, “if we do not honestly reckon with the role of religion in maintaining the patriarch’s rule at home, including how the men of religion help him to uphold his rule. The ‘proper Islam’ defense serves only the rule of the patriarch.” Yet she appeals to her own idiosyncratic version of “proper Islam” in her book, writing that the Quran “does not mention any form of genital cutting for women. In fact, passages from the Qur’an and Hadith advocate for women’s sexual satisfaction.” Does it matter what Muhammad said in the sixth century, or that his first wife, Khadijah, was 15 years his senior (another fact Ms. Eltahawy cites as evidence that Islam is more liberal than we think)? Religion isn’t what its ancient texts say; it’s what its adherents do.

The sloppy thinking in “Headscarves and Hymens” reflects an unfortunate tendency in Ms. Eltahawy’s political advocacy. In 2012, after publicizing her plans on the Web, she was charged with vandalism for defacing with pink spray paint a controversial subway ad reading: “In any war between the civilized man and the savage, support the civilized man. Support Israel. Defeat Jihad.” She compromises her credibility especially on the subject of Israel and anti-Semitism: In 2011, for example, she claimed that “not one anti-Israeli or anti-American sentiment was expressed” during the Arab Spring uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt. As a writer so passionate about women’s rights, Ms. Eltahawy may want to look more closely at the one country in the Middle East where women have been elected prime minister and wear bikinis on the beach.

Ms. Weiss is an associate books editor at the Journal.