Licensed to look: Bystanders, harassment and public complicity in Egypt

On a Ramadan morning in 1992, as Shahinaz attempted to board Bus No. 17 from Ataba Square to Bulaq El-Dakrour, a hand suddenly yanked her off the steps and hurled her into the street. Two men pinned her arms while two others assaulted her.

Despite her continuous screams in one of Cairo’s most crowded squares, no one stepped in to save her. A police sergeant, Salah Eddin Helmy, happened to pass by and rushed to her aid. By then, the rape had already taken place in full view and earshot of the crowd.

The incident became a national controversy, yet the defendants were ultimately acquitted.

In early February 2026, a man sexually harassed Mariam Shawky on a bus. She appealed to fellow passengers for help while documenting the assault on her phone. Instead of support, she was met with hostility. One passenger accused her clothing of provoking the attack. Online campaigns soon mobilized in defense of the harasser and against Mariam.

Blame it on biology

There is what can only be described as a sociological illiteracy that dominates public discussions of sexual harassment in Egypt. Each time an incident occurs, public discourse slips almost reflexively into biological determinism — the reductive notion that harassment is merely an individual failure to restrain instinct.

The argument is recycled: a woman’s clothing or behavior in public is to blame. “It is not normal for a girl to go out wearing clothes fit only for sleep and then complain of harassment,” the self-styled Islamic preacher Abdullah Roshdy wrote on Facebook.

Within this common framework, the man is cast as a victim of his hormones—a biological being driven by an uncontrollable surge of desire. The woman, meanwhile, becomes the external stimulus, held responsible for igniting those urges.

In his seminal work "Ways of Seeing," art critic and sociologist John Berger touches the narcissistic wound of modern visual culture: the radical divide between those who possess the right to look and those who are subjected to being looked at.

Berger lays the groundwork for the concept of the male gaze—later elaborated by British feminist filmmaker Laura Mulvey. It is not merely a direction of the eye, but a structure of power that governs how bodies appear in space. According to this dynamic, the social equation is captured in Berger’s famous phrase: “Men act, and women appear.”

On this vast social stage, if we may call it that, the man assumes the role of the surveyor — the active subject who holds the authority to observe and judge. The woman, by contrast, is cast as the surveyed — a being whose identity acquires meaning only through being seen.

This division fractures not only the man’s perception of the woman but also the woman’s perception of herself. She lives under a double surveillance: men’s scrutiny of her, and her own relentless monitoring of herself through men’s eyes. She becomes both guardian and prisoner of that image. Testimonies from survivors of harassment and sexual assault lay bare this split consciousness.

The danger of this dynamic lies in the social mechanism that grants men what might be called the right to look. In the Egyptian context, and in much of the Middle East more broadly, staring at women is not regarded as a violation of public decorum. On the contrary, it is treated as an implicit masculine cultural entitlement, largely immune from consequence.

When a man fixes his gaze on a woman in public, he is rarely challenged or questioned. The prevailing culture has normalized the notion that public space is a spectacle for men, and that women who traverse it constitute visual material available for consumption.

This visual entitlement legitimizes harassment. Once the presumed right to look is exercised without restraint, the man strips the woman of her status as a human subject—a conscious being with feelings and rights—and reduces her to a mere object of vision. This shift from subject to object is the crux of the matter. Harassment is not committed against a person, it is inflicted upon a thing.

Guardianship over virtue

The supposed right to look is embedded in a deeper doctrine: male guardianship over virtue, rooted in the collective masculine psyche of the East. A woman in public is not seen as an autonomous individual but as a being under supervision.

Within this logic, the man grants himself social custodianship. He becomes the owner of society and the enforcer of its moral rhythm.

In his book "This Tree," the writer and thinker Abbas Mahmoud Al-Aqqad (1889–1964) wrote: “Everything that is individual and spiritual, or chosen and voluntary, is closer to the nature of man. Everything that is generic and bodily, or mechanical and compulsory, is closer to the nature of woman. Its axis lies first in the inspiration of instinct and only then in the inspiration of understanding and conscience. Hence it may rightly be said that woman is a natural being and not a moral being in that sense which distinguishes the human character from other living creatures. The primary restraint of morality in woman is sexual containment, which we have previously indicated, and this belongs to instinct—in which female animals share—not to will, by which the human species, male and female, is distinguished.” He repeated variations of this argument throughout his works.

This hegemony manifests in the division of women into two categories: the “respectable” woman who adheres to the masculine code of dress, behavior and silence; and the rebellious or “permissible” woman who violates the agreed-upon script. A woman’s safety in the street thus becomes a conditional grant, not an inherent right.

She is safe so long as she remains invisible, or aligned with the patriarchal image that objectifies her — so long as she does not challenge the visual standards set by men.

In a clip from the television program “Malafat Al-Wahsh”, its host Nabih al-Wahsh declared: “I’ll say it again, and whoever gets upset can be upset. A girl who doesn’t preserve her modesty invites men to harass her. We said it before: a girl who cuts her pants at the back over her buttocks—raping her is a national duty, and harassing her is a patriotic obligation.”

What happens when a woman breaks the stereotype—when she wears what is considered eye-catching, laughs loudly, or walks in the street at a late hour? Here, harassment shifts from crime to corrective measure—what Khaled Montaser and critics of Salafi leanings have described as the ‘uncovered candy’ theory. The uncovered candy is a common Salafi analogy that compares a veiled woman to wrapped candy that remains protected, and an unveiled woman to unwrapped candy that attracts flies and dirt.

In the harasser’s mind—and perhaps in the mind of a complicit society—she is no longer a victim but a perpetrator who has defiled the sanctity of public space. Harassment becomes a legitimate reaction, an immediate punishment inflicted upon a body that dared to step outside the script.

This explains why harassment is so often accompanied by moral preaching or insults aimed at honor. We saw this in the harasser’s words to Mariam Shawky: “What do you know about religion? Look at what you’re wearing first!”

A similar pattern had appeared in 2015 in the case of Somaya Obeid, known as the 'Mall Girl.' She was harassed inside a shopping mall and insisted on pressing charges. The perpetrator was sentenced to prison. In response, television host Riham Saeed publicly defamed her on Al-Nahar TV, claiming that her “tight clothing” had encouraged young men to harass her.

Resisting harassment requires shifting the focus from the human being as a biological creature governed by instinct to the concept of personhood—a conscious, free and responsible self possessing irreducible dignity.

Within this framework, harassment can no longer be explained biologically or justified culturally. It becomes a direct assault on the human being as an end in themselves, not a means for satisfying desire or imposing domination.

Reexamining, reframing and consolidating society’s understanding of humanity and personhood may offer a path out not only of the crisis of pervasive sexual harassment, but also of the crises of racism and sectarianism.