Thanks to the IT Revolution, we’re familiar with hitherto unknown concepts and expressions, so many of them have already entered our vocabulary. Taharrush Jama’i is one of them. Of late, sections of the Western media and society have learnt what this Arabic expression is all about. It stands for “collective harassment”– aka taharrush el-jinsi or “sexual harassment” – of women by groups of men in public places.
Male sexual harassment of women is common across North Africa, Middle East, and South Asia and in many other developing parts of the world. The recent incidents of mass molestation, groping and harassment of Western women – purportedly by Syrian refugees – in Cologne (Germany) on the New Year’s Eve have turned the expression viral.
Meanwhile, Germany, Sweden, Norway and some other West European countries have taken proactive actions to address the problem of mass-molestation of women by refugees. European leaders, especially Angela Merkel, have decided to resolve the problem through re-education of Muslim refugees – about European culture, gender issues, norms and values – and stringent punishment, including deportation, for further taharrush.
Meanwhile, there has been a surge in anti-refugee protests and revenge attacks in Germany. Cologne city administration has barred Arab refugees from using public swimming pools. Alarmingly, a cartoon in French satirical cartoon magazine Charlie Hebdo, portraying the drowned Syrian child Alain Kurdi as a rapist, followed sexual attacks in Cologne! Europeans are now dead against taking any more Muslim refugees. As media reports, a total of 751 people have filed 676 criminal complaints against rowdy refugees in Cologne alone, “while Angela Merkel has already vowed to review asylum rules and make it easier to deport foreign criminals”.
I hope the re-education programmes and stringent punishment for sex offenders would work, eventually. However, it’s not that easy to re-educate people about something, which due to age-old beliefs and practices they indigenise as something integral to their norm. Thanks to the literal and convoluted understanding of the holy texts, some Muslims believe “uncovered” women are “available”; and those who want to protect themselves from sexual advances and molestation/rape by strangers in public places should wear hijab or cover themselves completely with burqas.
However, as appears on YouTube videos, men not only molest uncovered/Westernised women at home, but also molest hijab– and even burqa-clad women in various Arab countries. During the anti-Mubarak uprising in 2011, men didn’t spare hundreds of hijab-wearing Egyptian women from their taharrush or “rape game” at the Tahrir Square. Same thing happened to hundreds of women in the anti-Morsi rallies in 2013.
As subjective interpretations of the religious texts promote misogyny, patriarchy, polygamy and child marriage, so do they ‘legitimise’ molestation of women, maids and uncovered women among Muslims. Misogynist promoters of patriarchy justify subjugation of women in every sphere of life, sexually, socially, economically, and politically.
