EGYPT Illiteracy Classes 2009

As the taxi made its way through the bustling streets of Cairo, I felt as though I was stepping into the familiar world of the countless movies, songs, and books produced there, which have influenced millions of Arabs, myself included. From the middle of the 19th century, Egypt gradually became the centre of culture for the entire Arab world,a magnet for writers, musicians, producers, actors, painters, poets, dancers, journalists, and craftspeople. Women played a central role in that great cultural movement, which peaked in the 1960s and then went into slow decline.

Decades later, a 2013 Thomson Reuters Foundation survey of gender experts placed Egypt at the bottom of a ranking of 22 Arab states, citing discriminatory laws, a surge in violence and sexual harassment, and increased Islamic conservatism, after the so-called Arab Spring. In another damning report in 2015, the French Development Agency estimated that the lives of 35% of Egyptian women were severely damaged by their illiteracy.

My taxi ride took me to the suburbs of Cairo, where I was to visit the Association for the Development and Enhancement of Women (ADEW), an independentgroup running a nine-month literacy programme of daily classes for housewives.

Some of the women in the classes I attended noted with great amusement that I resembled Jackie Chan, the action movie star from Hong Kong. This was a great icebreaker that smoothed the way for the month I would spend sharing a little bit of their lives.

I asked the women to use their newly acquired skill to answer the following question: “Why did you decide to learn how to read and write?”