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Assyriologist and associate professor Martin Worthington, who worked on translations for the Marvel movie, created the first film entirely in Babylonian in But Elmahdy, determined that no one would ever forbid her from doing anything again, posted the same photo on her blog , so that everyone could see it. Wars and revolutions like the one in Egypt demand symbols: photos like Robert Capa's "Falling Soldier" from the Spanish Civil War, the image of a Vietnamese girl running away out of a village that had been bombed with napalm, or that of a boy raising his arms in the Warsaw ghetto.
Photos like these simplify the world. They reduced politics to emotions: fear, horror, hope. But does anyone know the name of that Vietnamese girl? What these icons have in common is that they are bigger than the fate of the individual. And something else, too: They depict victims. Elmahdy's photo felt like a rebuttal.
She wasn't a victim. She also differed from the Vietnamese girl and the falling soldier because she had taken her own photo and published it herself. Elmahdy soon realized that the photo was making a bigger and bigger impact.
Supporters of the Egyptian revolution, both the liberals and the deeply religious, distanced themselves from the photo. It was a young art student's personal act of protest against mistreatment at the hands of her parents. Every detail -- the flower, the pose, the stockings -- relates to a rule her parents had made. Those who didn't know that, and hardly anyone did, saw their own message in the photo. The image lends itself to multiple interpretations, and therein lies its power.
The photo only became an icon because the West made it into one. It appeared in newspapers in Switzerland, Italy, Belgium and Denmark. It corresponded to the notions many Europeans had initially had about the revolution in Egypt. They called it the Arab Spring and thought that what was happening in North Africa could be compared with the French Revolution. They hoped that when the protests were over, people would be more enlightened and build democracies, and that women would find their way to a more self-confident role in society.
Elmahdy says that she liked the attention, but that she was also receiving messages from men on Facebook who threatened to kill her. The threats were unsettling, but it was also an exciting time. She had no idea what it meant when her cat disappeared a few weeks after she had published the photo. A man called her to say that he had found the cat. She was alone when she went to see him, but the man was waiting for her with a friend.
The friend locked the door to the apartment, and the man tried to pull Elmahdy's pants off, saying that it was what she deserved for posting a naked picture of herself.
But when Elmahdy kept fighting off the men, they stole her wallet and mobile phone and released her the next morning. After that night, Elmahdy sensed that the photo could destroy her life if she stayed in Egypt. Ten days later, she boarded a plane in Cairo and fled to Sweden. That was in March Elmahdy had become a threat, because she was encouraging other women to imitate her.
In the CNN interview , when asked how she sees women in the "New Egypt," she said: "I am not positive at all unless a social revolution erupts. The role of women is the most fateful point of contention between Muslims and the rest of the world. The lives of women serve as a symbolic setting for this culture war.
And people in Europe and the United States look to Egypt with concern, because they believe that it is their duty to rescue the veiled woman from the oppressive clutches of a male-dominated society. In the West, it's easy to play the moral teacher when talking about women's rights in Egypt.
But we should remind ourselves that, until , it was illegal for a married woman in Germany to open her own bank account without her husband's consent. Less than years ago, women were not allowed to vote in Germany. And women have only been permitted to serve in combat units in the German armed forces since The conflict between the cultures is being waged with blunt instruments, a conflict over headscarves in German classrooms, burqas in France, high heels in Afghanistan and women driving cars in Saudi Arabia.
In Pakistan, the Taliban shot Malala Yousafzai, a schoolgirl, in the head because she had fought for the right of girls to go to school.
Dutch activist and politician Ayaan Hirsi Ali lives under police protection because she criticized the violence committed against women by Muslim men in a short film. And now Muslim preachers of hate have also set their sights on Aliaa Elmahdy. One person wrote on the Internet: "Her body should roast in hell.
One of the men who accuse Elmahdy of committing sins is Mahmoud Abdul Rahman. He is a year-old lawyer who works as a bookkeeper in the Egyptian finance ministry. At the beginning of the interview, he says that he knows how strange his arguments must sound for a person from Europe.
When he hears the call of the muezzin, Rahman interrupts the conversation to pray. He believes that Sharia law should be applied in Egypt. He says that he loves Egypt the way he loves his mother, and that his love would be even greater if all women in the country wore veils. There is a dark spot on his forehead. It comes from placing his head onto the floor five times a day to pray.
When he found a video online last spring in which she was standing naked in front of the Egyptian Embassy in Stockholm, holding a Koran in front of her genitalia, Rahman knew it was his duty to God to take action. He sat down at his desk at home and wrote a letter to the Egyptian attorney general, asking that charges be brought against Elmahdy for waving around a Koran while she was naked.
He wrote: "I ask Your Excellency to undertake all legal actions to deprive her of her Egyptian citizenship. He hasn't received a response yet and doesn't know whether his letter will lead to a trial. Rahman says that Elmahdy must be punished as severely as possible because he fears that if she is not, his daughters could imitate her actions one day.
There are tears in his eyes when he pulls his mobile phone out of his pocket and shows us pictures of his daughters. He says that his wife died of a heart attack a month ago, and that it is now up to him to raise his two little daughters.
In the film, Rahman's wife speaks with the reporters and, referring to Elmahdy, says: "She stood there naked with the Koran. What did the Koran do to her? The positions are irreconcilable in the dispute between Elmahdy and Rahman. Elmahdy invokes her personal freedom and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Rahman invokes God. Perhaps it would be easier for Elmahdy if she knew that Rahman is waging his war on his own, but Egypt's Salafist bloc, the "Party of Light," captured about a quarter of votes in the country's parliamentary elections about a year ago.
Elmahdy will not change the centuries-old traditions of these people with nude portraits. After fleeing from Egypt, Elmahdy applied for political asylum in Sweden, where she hardly left her apartment for six months.
She kept the curtains drawn, and whenever she heard a loud noise, she was afraid that her pursuers had come to get her. Sitting behind her closed curtains, she wondered what would become of her.
She no longer had a family, was no longer a student, and she had no job or home to return to. Elmahdy describes herself as an atheist. She has been living for the past five months with her boyfriend, blogger Kareem Amer , who, in was sentenced to four years in a maximum security prison for criticizing Islam and defaming former president Hosni Mubarak.
Here she talks exclusively to CNN in Cairo about why she posed nude. CNN: Why did you post a photo of yourself nude photo on Twitter, and why the red high heels and black stockings?
Elmahdy: After my photo was removed from Facebook, a male friend of mine asked me if he may post it on Twitter. I accepted because I am not shy of being a woman in a society where women are nothing but sex objects harassed on a daily basis by men who know nothing about sex or the importance of a woman. The photo is an expression of my being and I see the human body as the best artistic representation of that.
I took the photo myself using a timer on my personal camera. The powerful colors black and red inspire me. Elmahdy: I like being different. I love life, art, photography and expressing my thoughts through writing more than anything. That is why I studied media and hope to take it further to the TV world too so I can expose the truth behind the lies we endure everyday in this world.
I don't believe that we must have children only through marriage. It's all about love. How do they feel about you living with your boyfriend unmarried? Elmahdy: I last spoke to them 24 days back.
They want to support me and get closer, especially after the photo was released, but they accuse Kareem of manipulating me. He has been my support system and has passed along their text messages to me. I dropped out of AUC The American University in Cairo where she was a media student months back after my parents attempted to control my life by threatening not to pay the fees.
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