BEIRUT — Egyptian student Naira Ashraf boarded a bus to her university for the end-of-the-year exams last month while, unknown to her, on that same bus was a colleague carrying a concealed knife. As she got out he stabbed her repeatedly in front of the university gates, before slitting her throat.
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He later admitted to killing her because she had spurned his advances.
Four days later, in nearby Jordan, another young woman, Iman Irshaid, was shot five times at her university, also by a failed suitor. A text message purportedly received by Irshaid later emerged saying, “tomorrow I am coming to speak to you and if you don’t accept I am going to kill you just like the Egyptian killed that girl today.”
Violence against women is nothing new in the region, but the back-to-back cases by men who felt entitled to these women’s affections, and the apparent copycat nature of the second attack, have struck a chord with women across the Levant, Gulf and North Africa. They have served as a reminder that no woman is safe, anywhere, from anyone.
The gruesome, public nature of both murders, both taking place on campus grounds, caused a ripple of outrage that defied borders. Women from Syria, Lebanon, Kuwait, Algeria, and Tunisia took to social media to express anger and solidarity. Large groups of mostly women protested in Sudan, holding signs that said “Abolish the patriarchy” and “Free healthcare and education means women live in safety.”
In front of Jordan’s parliament on Wednesday, women clad in black held signs reading, “she said no once and was killed,” and they issued a statement calling for tougher laws and warning that this phenomenon was everywhere.
“The victims of male violence, here and in neighboring Arab countries, and in Arabic-speaking places, and in the world as a whole, are us,” it stated.
The explosion of fear and anger for Middle Eastern women came at a time of renewed concern over women’s rights around the world — especially following the Supreme Court’s decision last month to overturn Roe v. Wade, revoking the constitutional right to an abortion in the United States.
But few places in the world have justice systems or practices in place that sideline women’s issues as much as in the Middle East, where many of the countries are rife with female-targeted violence.
The two university attacks were not isolated instances. In the two weeks that followed, news of more killings emerged: a woman in the United Arab Emirates was stabbed by her husband over a dozen times in a parking lot. Palestinian authorities are investigating a woman’s death, which had been thought to be a suicide, after reports emerged implicating her family. Egyptian authorities found the body of TV anchor Shaima Jamal, killed and buried by her husband.
As women called for a largely-symbolic general cross-border strike on Wednesday to protest the persistent violence against women, another gruesome case emerged: a Jordanian man was arrested for killing and burying his 9-year-old and 12-year-old daughters.
In the past, such femicide cases would just spark anger within countries but this summer’s string of murders, and in particular the cases of Ashraf and Irshaid, appeared to cause a larger reaction across the whole region.
Rothna Begum, a senior women’s rights researcher at Human Rights Watch, said one driver of the transnational outcry is simply that “we know why they were killed.”
Women in the region, and worldwide in general, are more likely to be killed by family members or people who know them. As a result, many cases are covered up, with so called “honor killings” — homicides of women who have “brought shame” to their families — frequently presented as suicides.
Men killing their partners rationalize their actions by blaming the women’s behavior and the victim somehow becomes responsible for her own killing, Begum said.
“It is incredibly scary to see it replicating,” she added. Women are “realizing that their oppression is not solely in their country or to them, but it is across the region. Whether you’re a woman in the West Bank, or Gaza, or Egypt, or in the UAE, your stories are very familiar and similar.”
In each of these cases, authorities failed the women, Begum noted, with laws and policies that discriminate against women, and treat them as second class citizens. In many cases, including Ashraf’s, repeated complaints about the assailant were filed to police before the attack.
In case of Ashraf’s attacker, neighbors told local outlet Cairo 24 that he never made any trouble and people only used to hear the family’s voices “when he used to beat his mother and sisters.”
Last year, a Kuwaiti woman filed two police complaints against a man she said had been harassing and threatening her for over a year after she turned down his marriage proposal. He was detained and released, after which he crashed his car into hers, kidnapped her and her two children, then fatally stabbed her in front of them.
Women are realizing “they can’t go out in public, they can’t say no to a man, without fear of being killed because of his sense of entitlement over them,” Begum said.
In Beirut on Thursday, a group of mostly women gathered to protest the recent rise in cases of violence against women around the region.
“Women are still being killed because there are no deterrents,” said Faten Abou Chacra, a campaign coordinator with Kafa, a non-profit that works on female violence and exploitation. Its Arabic name means “Enough.”
Lebanon has a domestic violence law, but Abou Chacra said its rarely invoked and she blamed the state for not protecting women and children and having no national strategy to try to change the current way of thinking.
“Everything is cumulative,” she said. “The sexual harassments that take place are hushed up, which evolve into assault, which is hushed up, which evolves to rape.”
Heba Farouk Mahfouz in Cairo contributed to this report.
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