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Denial on the Nile

By Khaled Diab

Egypt’s rounding-up and incarceration of HIV-positive people is unjust, unrealistic and unhealthy.

 

March 2008

Egypt has embarked on a troubling anti-AIDS campaign of sorts. However, rather than redoubling its efforts to arrest the spread of the killer virus, the government has been rounding up people who are HIV-positive.

 

Described as a widening “crackdown” by Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, police have recently arrested 12 men suspected of carrying the virus, four of whom have already received a one-year prison sentence.

 

“This not only violates the most basic rights of people living with HIV. It also threatens public health, by making it dangerous for anyone to seek information about HIV prevention or treatment,” the two groups said in a joint statement.

 

Although Egyptian police have denied that the men were taken in because they were HIV-positive, they have been forced to take HIV tests as well as intrusive examinations to ascertain whether they engaged in homosexual acts. This cynical attempt to link AIDS with homosexuality is another troubling aspect of these cases. In addition, linking AIDS with sexual orientation is likely, in a country where sexual education is relatively modest and largely informal, to lull heterosexuals into a false sense of security.

 

This all brings back haunting memories of the early years of the AIDS epidemic when terrified Christians conservatives tried to ‘rationalise’ HIV as being divine wrath against ‘sodomites’. Gay friends have even suggested to me that the advent of AIDS set back their cause by years. But luckily it has recovered in the west. Their Arab counterparts are not so fortunate.

 

“Arbitrary arrests, forcible HIV tests, and physical abuse only add to the disgraceful record of Egypt’s criminal justice system, where torture and ill-treatment are greeted with impunity,” slammed Amnesty International’s Hassiba Hadj-Sahraoui.

 

In recent years, the Egyptian regime and its security services have worked hard to prove their credentials as equal-opportunities oppressors. While Egypt’s unlawful ‘state of emergency’ over the past quarter of a century has been traditionally used against the Muslim Brotherhood and other Islamists, it has also been employed to crack down on homosexuals since the shocking Queen Boat fiasco of 2001.

 

This was probably motivated by the need on the part of the regime, which had never really bothered with Egypt’s discreet gay community before, to counter allegations that their anti-Islamism was anti-Islamic and to steal some of the Islamists’ moral thunder.

 

But by refocusing attention on the ‘moral’ side of HIV/AIDS, the government is endangering and undermining its own and other efforts to staunch the spread of the disease, such as its plans to produce generic antiretroviral drugs and the country’s decisions to join Unicef’s international campaign to combat AIDS among children, and numerous health ministry and civil society efforts. It also overlooks the fact that many people with HIV got it from their monogamous partner, from blood transfusions, or in the womb.

 

Commenting on the arrest, one commentator on Horytna.net, an independent on-line youth magazine and radio, wrote: “In 2005, the former Egyptian Health Minister Awad Tag el-Deen said that his ministry was prepared to do everything necessary to help AIDS patients. But, today, if you have HIV, prepare yourself to be arrested.”

 

This fixation on AIDS as a ‘social disease’ with a social cure is about as futile as western efforts in the early 20th century to combat the spread of syphilis by focusing on abstinence, monogamy and other traditional values. Last weekend, I attended an exhibition on ‘Disease: between body and soul’, which displayed a number of moralising French and English-language posters from the first half of the 20th century.

 

It also puts me in mind of the current abstinence campaigns that are gaining in popularity in the United States. Interestingly, despite their mutual accusations of global jihads/crusades and conspiracies, conservative Christian and Muslim groups have managed to find common cause on the issue of AIDS to try to pressurise their governments not to commit to UN efforts to combat the epidemic.

 

However, promoting abstinence as the best medicine is not working. Although Egypt is still classified as a low HIV-prevalence country, the rate of new infections has risen dramatically since the 1990s. The World Bank warns that the rate of infection could reach 4% of the Arab world’s population by 2015. And due to limited data and the social stigma attached to the disease, some experts contend that the actual infection rate is possibly 10 times higher than the number of recorded cases.

 

Groups at particular risk include, like other countries, drug addicts, homosexuals and sex workers. In addition, according to UNICEF, up to 30% of married women in remote parts of the countryside have sexually transmitted diseases, which may suggest that they are at particular risk of contracting AIDS, as are the estimated 1 million street children in Cairo.

 

No matter what conservatives think of the morality of AIDS patients, their sense of humanity should lead them to forgive the ‘sinners’ their transgressions and not kick the weak while they are down. Some Islamic authorities are trying to minimise the stigma in a Muslim framework. For instance, a leading Egyptian religious scholar has opined that people who die of AIDS should be regarded as ‘martyrs’.

 

Moreover, not all religious authorities take a fire-and-brimstone view of AIDS sufferers. Just like some Christian charities and churches offer support to people with HIV, some mosques and segments of Islamic civil society do the same.

 

In addition, whatever people of faith think of sexual liberty, they should exercise a certain amount of pragmatism. People can catch a dizzying array of scary diseases through food, yet no one advises them to fast to avoid the risk.

 

While sex is not quite at the same level as food on our needs list, people have and will always have a strong appetite for it. Very few people can lead a life of saintly chastity, particularly with the late age at which Egyptians are tending to get married. Millions of young Egyptians certainly engage in some very un-Islamic relationships. An estimated tenth of Egyptian university students are engaging in casual sex under the cover of informal temporary marriage ‘contracts’, known as ‘urfi’. That’s not to mention those who practise the unsafer variety, without the flimsy paper protection.

 

Besides, casual sex has, given the traditional ease of contracting and terminating temporary marriages, long been a feature of Muslim societies. For instance, Ibn Battuta, the famous 14th-century Moroccan globetrotter, married and divorced at almost every leg of his three-decade long trek around the world. Family legend has it that my own family and most other Diabs in the Middle East are descended from Diab Ibn Ghanim, a legendary adventurer and traveller from the Maghreb.

 

If Egypt needs proof that ‘chastity’ is not the answer to AIDS, it only needs look west where, it would seem, safe sex is better than no sex, after all. While the number of people infected with HIV is rising in Egypt and other Arab countries, it is falling in the sexually more liberal west due to improved sex education, blood vetting, clean-needle campaigns, etc.

 

 

This column appeared in The Guardian Unlimited’s Comment is Free section on 23 February 2008. Read the related discussion.

 

 

 

 

ă2008 K. Diab. Unless otherwise stated, all the content on this website is the copyright of Khaled Diab.