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Radius: A Story of Feminist Revolution
A haunting, intimate account of the women and men who built a feminist revolution in the middle of the Arab Spring.
In 2012, the joyful hopes of the democratic Egyptian Revolution were tempered by revelations of mass sexual assault in Tahrir Square in Cairo, the revolution’s symbolic birthplace.
This is the story of the women and men who formed Opantish - Operation Anti-Sexual Harassment - who deployed hundreds of volunteers, scouts rescue teams, and getaway drivers to intervene in the spiraling cases of sexual violence against women protesters in the square. Organized and led by women during 2012–2013 - the final, chaotic months of Egypt’s revolution - teams of volunteers fought their way into circles of men to pull the woman at the center to safety. Often, they risked assault themselves.
Journalist Yasmin El-Rifae was one of Opantish’s organizers, and this is her evocative, aching account of their work, as they raced to develop new tactics, struggled with a revolution bleeding into counter-revolution, and dealt with the long aftermath of assault and devastation. Told in a daring, hybrid narrative style drawn from years of interviews and her own, intimate experience, it is a story of overlapping circles: the circles of male attackers activists had to break through, the ways sexual violence can be circled off as “irrelevant” to political struggle, and the endless repetitive loops of living with trauma.
Introducing a powerful new voice, a writer whose searchingly beautiful, spare prose cuts to the core of a story ever more urgent and relevant: of women’s resistance when all else has failed.
In 2012, the joyful hopes of the democratic Egyptian Revolution were tempered by revelations of mass sexual assault in Tahrir Square in Cairo, the revolution’s symbolic birthplace.
This is the story of the women and men who formed Opantish - Operation Anti-Sexual Harassment - who deployed hundreds of volunteers, scouts rescue teams, and getaway drivers to intervene in the spiraling cases of sexual violence against women protesters in the square. Organized and led by women during 2012–2013 - the final, chaotic months of Egypt’s revolution - teams of volunteers fought their way into circles of men to pull the woman at the center to safety. Often, they risked assault themselves.
Journalist Yasmin El-Rifae was one of Opantish’s organizers, and this is her evocative, aching account of their work, as they raced to develop new tactics, struggled with a revolution bleeding into counter-revolution, and dealt with the long aftermath of assault and devastation. Told in a daring, hybrid narrative style drawn from years of interviews and her own, intimate experience, it is a story of overlapping circles: the circles of male attackers activists had to break through, the ways sexual violence can be circled off as “irrelevant” to political struggle, and the endless repetitive loops of living with trauma.
Introducing a powerful new voice, a writer whose searchingly beautiful, spare prose cuts to the core of a story ever more urgent and relevant: of women’s resistance when all else has failed.
208 pages, Hardcover
First published October 18, 2022
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 41 reviews
June 10, 2023
Yasmin El-Rifae’s Radius is in equal parts inspiring and horrifying, un-put-down-able and in places close to impossible to keep reading, and for that it is essential. It’s an exploration of a women-led resistance to sexual violence, much of it seemingly committed by allies in a revolutionary social movement. That means it explores events and their costs, tactics, actions, opportune and planned moments of defence of women’s participation in transformational struggles and strategies to strengthen that defence. It looks at the actions of social movements and of the State, and the many reasons people take action to stop that sexual violence. It is not a book of big theory, but an account of one struggle grounded in notions of feminist praxis.
It’s the story of Opantish –Operation Anti-Sexual Harassment – that grew up around events in Cairo’s Tahrir Square early in 2013, and continued with the protest movement. Harassment is very much an understatement. Many of us looked from afar at the events in Cairo, as the so-called ‘Arab Spring’ (oh, how much of our cultural world of politics is constrained by Paris, Prague and 1968) seemed to be bringing about change across North Africa. We saw inspiring alliances, well organised, fluid action with more than a hint of spontaneity at times. Yet for those who paid more attention there were worrying reports of sexual violence (including harassment, assault, and rape) within the activist moments, and indications that it may have been systemic, and at least partly organised. El-Rifae takes us into a response to that violence, and direct intervention into attacks on women that if not systemic and organised were at least mass events of the systematic isolation and sexual assault.
Crucially, El-Rifae does not shy away the experience of being in the middle of those assaults – as intervening and becoming one of the many assaulted. This happens mainly in the first section of the book, at the most intense times of protest-as-a-cover-for-assault: the detail is anything but gratuitous, essential for understanding how and why the resistance took the form it did, vital for grasping its effects, and fundamental to recognising the trauma of both the assaulted and those who intervened through Opantish. She also makes a powerful case that Opantish was distinctive (there were other intervention groups) in that it was women-led, and recognised that women going into the mass assaults was going to be essential to get those being assaulted out.
The other crucial point El-Rifae makes is that it is not possible to pin down the genesis and drivers of the assaults. For some it was easy to claim it was the military and State engineering this sexual violence – it is a not uncommon tactic in many conflict settings (look at what we know about rape as a weapon of war during the Yugoslav civil war of the 1990s, in Rwanda during the genocide, and frankly in most other military and colonial contexts). This claim may make movement participants feel better, but El-Rifae notes that there is little evidence that this was the only or even a major cause, and that many of those assaulting women were part of the revolutionary movement; she suggests that not all of them were ‘swept along in the moment’. She is also careful not to lay the blame at some sense of a retrograde Egyptian masculinist/patriarchal culture. This is a delicate balance, where she grounds sexual violence and harassment in the everyday life of growing up in Cairo – and as alarming as those banal situations she describes are, from what other women tell me about their lives there is little that is specific to that place about those experiences.
Yet this question of cause is not the focus of the work; El-Rifae, as one of the organisers of Opantish, looks at the mechanics of organisation on the ground, on the day, and at the effects of this action on activists, both men and women. She draws on her own experiences, on interviews with others from the movement, on social media posts, comments, and reports to build an alarming picture of a group of women and men who threw themselves into extremely dangerous situations, and who organised well for self-protection even if that organisation was hard, in some cases impossible, to sustain on the ground.
Amid all of this, of her frank and blunt discussions of individual and collective PTSD, of lost or strained nearly to breaking point relationships, of the patronising contempt of those she meets in New York (unlike most she is able to get away, not that that does much to minimise the trauma), there is a second equally important narrative. El-Rifae discusses tactics, action, and organisation on the ground, ways to act effectively to get into the roiling mass of men assaulting women to isolate and extract them, of acting in groups to get to the women, create a passage, and build a space for them to be taken to the relative safety of the spaces the activists were able to secure. That is to say, inside the discussion of events on the ground, of organisation, of trauma and the problems of what we’ve long thought of as self-care, there is also an activists’ training and advice manual. She doesn’t shy away from the errors Opantish made (would that more of us who wrote about social movements were this frank – there is much to learn from what we get wrong at the kind of micro-level discussed here), but she is also clear about what worked, and the challenges of making that work.
It may be difficult to read, in places it is harrowing and fully deserves trigger warnings in the strongest terms, but it is also an inspiring tale of self-organised resistance, of rescue, and of alliance and comradeship. At the same time, it is a warning about the danger of separating out struggles, of sidelining, for instance, gender or race equality to focus on the ‘more important’ structural questions of class or democracy, and of prioritising the vanguard over the coalition. With all of that it is more than reportage on an alarming aspect of a revolutionary movement, it is also a tactical and organisational guide to building effective, safer, and hopefully more successful social struggles. It is essential reading for our times.
It’s the story of Opantish –Operation Anti-Sexual Harassment – that grew up around events in Cairo’s Tahrir Square early in 2013, and continued with the protest movement. Harassment is very much an understatement. Many of us looked from afar at the events in Cairo, as the so-called ‘Arab Spring’ (oh, how much of our cultural world of politics is constrained by Paris, Prague and 1968) seemed to be bringing about change across North Africa. We saw inspiring alliances, well organised, fluid action with more than a hint of spontaneity at times. Yet for those who paid more attention there were worrying reports of sexual violence (including harassment, assault, and rape) within the activist moments, and indications that it may have been systemic, and at least partly organised. El-Rifae takes us into a response to that violence, and direct intervention into attacks on women that if not systemic and organised were at least mass events of the systematic isolation and sexual assault.
Crucially, El-Rifae does not shy away the experience of being in the middle of those assaults – as intervening and becoming one of the many assaulted. This happens mainly in the first section of the book, at the most intense times of protest-as-a-cover-for-assault: the detail is anything but gratuitous, essential for understanding how and why the resistance took the form it did, vital for grasping its effects, and fundamental to recognising the trauma of both the assaulted and those who intervened through Opantish. She also makes a powerful case that Opantish was distinctive (there were other intervention groups) in that it was women-led, and recognised that women going into the mass assaults was going to be essential to get those being assaulted out.
The other crucial point El-Rifae makes is that it is not possible to pin down the genesis and drivers of the assaults. For some it was easy to claim it was the military and State engineering this sexual violence – it is a not uncommon tactic in many conflict settings (look at what we know about rape as a weapon of war during the Yugoslav civil war of the 1990s, in Rwanda during the genocide, and frankly in most other military and colonial contexts). This claim may make movement participants feel better, but El-Rifae notes that there is little evidence that this was the only or even a major cause, and that many of those assaulting women were part of the revolutionary movement; she suggests that not all of them were ‘swept along in the moment’. She is also careful not to lay the blame at some sense of a retrograde Egyptian masculinist/patriarchal culture. This is a delicate balance, where she grounds sexual violence and harassment in the everyday life of growing up in Cairo – and as alarming as those banal situations she describes are, from what other women tell me about their lives there is little that is specific to that place about those experiences.
Yet this question of cause is not the focus of the work; El-Rifae, as one of the organisers of Opantish, looks at the mechanics of organisation on the ground, on the day, and at the effects of this action on activists, both men and women. She draws on her own experiences, on interviews with others from the movement, on social media posts, comments, and reports to build an alarming picture of a group of women and men who threw themselves into extremely dangerous situations, and who organised well for self-protection even if that organisation was hard, in some cases impossible, to sustain on the ground.
Amid all of this, of her frank and blunt discussions of individual and collective PTSD, of lost or strained nearly to breaking point relationships, of the patronising contempt of those she meets in New York (unlike most she is able to get away, not that that does much to minimise the trauma), there is a second equally important narrative. El-Rifae discusses tactics, action, and organisation on the ground, ways to act effectively to get into the roiling mass of men assaulting women to isolate and extract them, of acting in groups to get to the women, create a passage, and build a space for them to be taken to the relative safety of the spaces the activists were able to secure. That is to say, inside the discussion of events on the ground, of organisation, of trauma and the problems of what we’ve long thought of as self-care, there is also an activists’ training and advice manual. She doesn’t shy away from the errors Opantish made (would that more of us who wrote about social movements were this frank – there is much to learn from what we get wrong at the kind of micro-level discussed here), but she is also clear about what worked, and the challenges of making that work.
It may be difficult to read, in places it is harrowing and fully deserves trigger warnings in the strongest terms, but it is also an inspiring tale of self-organised resistance, of rescue, and of alliance and comradeship. At the same time, it is a warning about the danger of separating out struggles, of sidelining, for instance, gender or race equality to focus on the ‘more important’ structural questions of class or democracy, and of prioritising the vanguard over the coalition. With all of that it is more than reportage on an alarming aspect of a revolutionary movement, it is also a tactical and organisational guide to building effective, safer, and hopefully more successful social struggles. It is essential reading for our times.
Read
May 27, 2025like inspiring is really not the right word and thoughtful is not nearly enough, just really thorny and striking.
January 7, 2025
4.5, kind of life altering. can’t imagine trying to grapple with the enormity of the horrors this book confronts without the guidance of el-rifae’s frank treatment of the subject matter and open-ended approach. I can tell already that her work will inform my thinking about violence and organizing for a long time
April 29, 2023
A powerful and intimate read about the experiences of the people in the organization Opantish. ‘The change came from the work itself’
September 13, 2023
A powerful and original book that weaves together diaristic experience of going through intense and traumatic events, granular detail of the organizing of Opantish intervening in sexual assault in the revolutionary squares of Egypt, a meditation on gender-based violence, and a story of individuals taking part in the ups and downs of massive social upheaval of revolutions and counterrevolutions. This book is masterful in its ability to weave together these elements in a short, gripping, and poignant emotional story. A must read.
April 11, 2023
This book is a remarkable piece of feminist writing. Probably the best I've read in years.
The combination of oral history and sincere, unpretentious prose comes so naturally to El-Rifae. I'm just amazed with book's ability to cover so much starting from the revolution and it's downfalls, nonformal hierarchies and collective dynamics in seemingly non-hierarchical groups, western "feminist" gaze, gaslighting female organisers experience from their male comrades and so much more. Yasmine El-Rifae is a brilliant writer and I wish to read more from her. Until then I'll be getting back to Radius, because there's no chance you can comprehend all the layers this book offers in just one sitting.
The combination of oral history and sincere, unpretentious prose comes so naturally to El-Rifae. I'm just amazed with book's ability to cover so much starting from the revolution and it's downfalls, nonformal hierarchies and collective dynamics in seemingly non-hierarchical groups, western "feminist" gaze, gaslighting female organisers experience from their male comrades and so much more. Yasmine El-Rifae is a brilliant writer and I wish to read more from her. Until then I'll be getting back to Radius, because there's no chance you can comprehend all the layers this book offers in just one sitting.
November 23, 2023
i hateeeeeeee men bruh
March 14, 2023
I think this book will stay with me for a long time to come. The story felt urgent and needed in the history making of the 2011 revolution and to the narrative of otherwise disappearing stories. It was a powerful narrative, bringing together testimonies of feminist revolution in the fight against and survival of sexual violence.
August 7, 2025
Heart wrenching, and horrifying, but absolutely remarkable. This novel covers the mass sexual assaults that occurred in Cairo’s Tahrir Square during protests from 2011-2013. The author describes OPANTISH (Operation Anti Sexual Harassment), the formation of it, the logistical elements of its operations, and the actual intervention teams. Several accounts are given of the horrifically disgusting attacks & the responses of such. What struck to me most, was the society’s reactions to these attacks, there were several sides to the coin.
- Fathers and mothers who didn’t want their daughter’s rape to be known so that their family name could be protected.
- Daughters who wanted their hymens to be reconstructed in order to remain a ‘girl’ and a ‘virgin’, and the families that encouraged such.
- Men who pretended to intervene in order to trick the victim & take part of the assault.
- Men who feel emasculated by the attack of their girlfriends, wives, sisters, mothers, taking them as an injury to their own senses of masculinity
- Women who feared for their own basic right to protest, feared for their families and friends safety during the regime / protests, women who feared being stripped naked and attacked by mass groups of men.
Perhaps one of the most horrifying realizations / perspectives was the fact that a lot of the times, it wasn’t individuals hired by the government / Brotherhood to limit women’s freedoms & prevent them from participating, it was their own fellow protestors who were attacking them.
“These attacks.. are attacks not only on women as women, they are on women as revolutionaries, protestors, as citizens” Protestors united under the same cause, protestors who all came to the square with ‘one mission’, but some had decided that others were not worthy of protesting.
These horrible accounts of attacks and tragedies seem worlds away, so grotesque that they could not possibly be a reality; but that is exactly what people use as a safety blanket, exactly why there are no monuments to commemorate the victims of mass rapes. However, in all, these attacks and stripping women of their rights *are* still a prevalent issue, even in an area as close as home.
“The bodily fights in Tahrir and our choices about whether and how to give birth, and how we’re treated for those choices within institutions like medicine, workplaces, and families, are connected by a politics of sexual control that manifests far beyond Egypt.” No, not as severe and dangerous as the attacks in Tahrir, but yes all women.
- Fathers and mothers who didn’t want their daughter’s rape to be known so that their family name could be protected.
- Daughters who wanted their hymens to be reconstructed in order to remain a ‘girl’ and a ‘virgin’, and the families that encouraged such.
- Men who pretended to intervene in order to trick the victim & take part of the assault.
- Men who feel emasculated by the attack of their girlfriends, wives, sisters, mothers, taking them as an injury to their own senses of masculinity
- Women who feared for their own basic right to protest, feared for their families and friends safety during the regime / protests, women who feared being stripped naked and attacked by mass groups of men.
Perhaps one of the most horrifying realizations / perspectives was the fact that a lot of the times, it wasn’t individuals hired by the government / Brotherhood to limit women’s freedoms & prevent them from participating, it was their own fellow protestors who were attacking them.
“These attacks.. are attacks not only on women as women, they are on women as revolutionaries, protestors, as citizens” Protestors united under the same cause, protestors who all came to the square with ‘one mission’, but some had decided that others were not worthy of protesting.
These horrible accounts of attacks and tragedies seem worlds away, so grotesque that they could not possibly be a reality; but that is exactly what people use as a safety blanket, exactly why there are no monuments to commemorate the victims of mass rapes. However, in all, these attacks and stripping women of their rights *are* still a prevalent issue, even in an area as close as home.
“The bodily fights in Tahrir and our choices about whether and how to give birth, and how we’re treated for those choices within institutions like medicine, workplaces, and families, are connected by a politics of sexual control that manifests far beyond Egypt.” No, not as severe and dangerous as the attacks in Tahrir, but yes all women.
January 27, 2023
I appreciate this book so, so much.
It is an account of the activist group Opantish, who rescued women demonstrators from sexual violence in Tahrir Square during the Egyptian revolution. It's done in several parts - the early start to the group, then describing their work as they got more professional, and finally after the main members drifted apart.
I found each part fascinating in its own way. A rumination on sexual assault, on patriarchy, on womanhood. And also on activism - the toll it takes on you, the second hand trauma and a kind of survivors guilt, the cliqueism, the conflicts that arise when the people hurting you are also yours - something not everyone wants to acknowledge.
I think what stood out to me the most while reading is how this book is partially very far removed from anything I can imagine, and partially intimately familiar. I cannot fully imagine the horror of mass assault in the public square. But when she describes spotting the men masturbating to her in the car, or amusing themselves pretending they're about to hurt her and watch her flinch, well. Nowhere as often, but Yes All Women. I find it so genuinely, unbearably sad that this is what unites us, across time and space.
For me personally, such connections also helped me better frame and think about one of the more difficult aspects described in the book: discussing the events in front of (as this book is at least partially for) a western audience, taking into account the backdrop of Islamophobia and racism, white saviourism towards Muslim women, etc. I found the meditation on that aspect interesting in general. Tbh, as a white woman, I will have to think carefully about how I will go about recommending this book, which I think is an important read, to friends.
Re the activism too, it gave me a bit to think about with my own bizarre, slapdash involvement this past year with Ukrainian refugees. I can see a lot of the activism and NGO-related issues (hem hem all the problems with "structure") mirrored in my own involvement and the people I meet. A bit depressing that this unites us across time and space too. But to be honest, it also made me feel deeply, intensely lonely haha. Though the work I do is not at all physical the way theirs was, I wish I had a proper organisation - people I could rely on the way they could rely on each other, despite the tensions and conflicts. Well, this is a tangent.
I'm sure I will come back to this book again later, and get even more out of it then.
It is an account of the activist group Opantish, who rescued women demonstrators from sexual violence in Tahrir Square during the Egyptian revolution. It's done in several parts - the early start to the group, then describing their work as they got more professional, and finally after the main members drifted apart.
I found each part fascinating in its own way. A rumination on sexual assault, on patriarchy, on womanhood. And also on activism - the toll it takes on you, the second hand trauma and a kind of survivors guilt, the cliqueism, the conflicts that arise when the people hurting you are also yours - something not everyone wants to acknowledge.
I think what stood out to me the most while reading is how this book is partially very far removed from anything I can imagine, and partially intimately familiar. I cannot fully imagine the horror of mass assault in the public square. But when she describes spotting the men masturbating to her in the car, or amusing themselves pretending they're about to hurt her and watch her flinch, well. Nowhere as often, but Yes All Women. I find it so genuinely, unbearably sad that this is what unites us, across time and space.
For me personally, such connections also helped me better frame and think about one of the more difficult aspects described in the book: discussing the events in front of (as this book is at least partially for) a western audience, taking into account the backdrop of Islamophobia and racism, white saviourism towards Muslim women, etc. I found the meditation on that aspect interesting in general. Tbh, as a white woman, I will have to think carefully about how I will go about recommending this book, which I think is an important read, to friends.
Re the activism too, it gave me a bit to think about with my own bizarre, slapdash involvement this past year with Ukrainian refugees. I can see a lot of the activism and NGO-related issues (hem hem all the problems with "structure") mirrored in my own involvement and the people I meet. A bit depressing that this unites us across time and space too. But to be honest, it also made me feel deeply, intensely lonely haha. Though the work I do is not at all physical the way theirs was, I wish I had a proper organisation - people I could rely on the way they could rely on each other, despite the tensions and conflicts. Well, this is a tangent.
I'm sure I will come back to this book again later, and get even more out of it then.
February 25, 2025
This book left me raw and speechless. It’s been a while since I’ve read a book as important as this one. El-Rifae writes so beautifully about Opantish and the work this organization was and wasn’t able to accomplish during the Tahrir Square protests. I want every person in my life who is an organizer to read this book - this book is about high high high stakes organizing, where often the work itself is directly traumatizing. The book is also about memory, how we need to write these things down so that we remember because our brains often work (understandably) to erase our memories of trauma. And finally, the book is about how social justice work isn’t always about the impact that it has on the world at large, but it’s about the impact it has on the people who do it. You can’t do it without being altered. This book will take a while to process. Right now it feels like I’ll be thinking about it for the rest of my life.
July 4, 2023
围绕Opantish组织的核心成员展开，描写时间的同时穿插访谈对话多角度展现不同人的命运如何被影响。
从元老成员质疑女性是否应该参与，对identify as 女性的男性的接受程度，参与活动给男性inflated ego和personal victory，支持者和施暴者的转换只在一念之间，男性支持者称和女性相比自己收到的骚扰不值一提，作者担心这本书会对当事人二次伤害，采访媒体简单的把原因归结于政府宗教，组织发展到后来的方向、结构化后少数人拥有最终决定权，英美的朋友对失败原因表示好奇，survivor和victim的定义与区别，好友友尽因为相识的痛苦回忆，女性能孕育生命的价值被放大到剖腹产率极高，少有自然生育……
配合台湾metoo的时事，it’s important to be talking, to be writing, to be remembering, even just once.
从元老成员质疑女性是否应该参与，对identify as 女性的男性的接受程度，参与活动给男性inflated ego和personal victory，支持者和施暴者的转换只在一念之间，男性支持者称和女性相比自己收到的骚扰不值一提，作者担心这本书会对当事人二次伤害，采访媒体简单的把原因归结于政府宗教，组织发展到后来的方向、结构化后少数人拥有最终决定权，英美的朋友对失败原因表示好奇，survivor和victim的定义与区别，好友友尽因为相识的痛苦回忆，女性能孕育生命的价值被放大到剖腹产率极高，少有自然生育……
配合台湾metoo的时事，it’s important to be talking, to be writing, to be remembering, even just once.
August 26, 2024
required reading for organizers
February 15, 2025
I cannot recommend this highly enough, everyone should read it. But only if and when you are safe and with people you love.
May 20, 2025
wrenching but remarkably astute feminist portrait of the knotted and ever shifting nature of care, violence, community, and hope amidst the ongoing upheaval of revolution and its aftermath.
September 26, 2023
Glad that i made the decision to read this book, as a person and a woman who lived and worked in Cairo during the time and experiences captured in the book. It is not a comprehensive history, but rather a personal archiving project that extends an invitation for more writing about that time and what happened to us all.
September 15, 2023
I wrote a review about the book, on this shistory, rememberance, forgetness and such lived archives.
https://themarkaz.org/radius-recounts...
https://themarkaz.org/radius-recounts...
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July 28, 2025Thank you to the organizers of the Critical Perspectives on Care: Social Reproduction Theory in a Global Context Symposium for hosting this book club.
Disclaimer: I do not rate nonfiction books.
Disclaimer: I do not rate nonfiction books.
January 13, 2025
“I knew, also, that I could not write anything else until I had written this.” Yasmin El-Rifae’s “story of feminist revolution”, Radius, is propelled by the urgency not just of the subject matter, the harrowing events being detailed, but by a need to pay witness, to animate a story at risk of not surviving past the eyes and ears and bodies of those who were there, those who have no other choice but to remember. This is the story of Opantish, a resistance group established in the wake of mass sexual assault in Tahrir Square, in Cairo, during the Egyptian Revolution of 2012 - 2013, weaving together El-Rifae’s perspective with both other journalistic accounts and her own interviews with survivors — I thought often of Lucia Osborne-Crowley’s approach to telling stories of survival, and how the personal is put into a wider context, polyphonic and powerful. “They were there, in my head, in the weight of these things that we now knew, these things that had to be made to fit, somehow, with the rest of life. I preferred, in the end, to be caught in a moment of reach-ing, of trying, of rounding my mouth around the words that I could find.” El-Rifae is unflinching in her recounting, and yet achieves such gentleness and pathos towards those she writes of. Noting how trauma instils “a different way of reading the world”, she goes on to say that “Everything changed, irrevocably, with a ground-shifting violence that society has still not confronted, even as I write this many years later.” In spite of everything, or perhaps because of it, seeing how people put their lives on the line to protect and defend women and justice both, Radius gestures towards hope.
January 15, 2025
This is a moving and thoughtful account of Opantish, which sought to mobilise against gang sexual assault in Tahrir Square during the Arab Spring. El-Rifae has an anthropologists eye here, and a deep interest in how this work impacted the volunteers, and in examining the group dynamics, making it a very engaging read for anyone with experience of organising in mass demonstrations. The stakes are high - both because of the sense of urgency in the movement, and the brutal, systematic and overwhelming nature of the attacks. Committed to making a difference, these activists persist even when the scale of the danger - female activists on the teams in the square frequently are sexually assaulted themselves, and male activists also on occasion - and the sheer impossibility of keeping up is clear. This creates a range of dynamics, all of which El-rifae mines with compassion and respect, to draw out some kind of lesson about how to organise and exist in unjust societies.
This is not an easy read often - I had little idea how bad the assaults were before reading it - but it is a hopeful and invigorating one. One of the most memorable bits for me is when the group start enlisting men on the outskirts (or even inskirts) of the assaults to help, recognising that the line between hero and abuser can be thinner than we often acknowledge and using community accountability in interesting ways. This theme also enables El-rifae to balance her regrets and her pride in ways that enable analysis and also a call to action.
This is not an easy read often - I had little idea how bad the assaults were before reading it - but it is a hopeful and invigorating one. One of the most memorable bits for me is when the group start enlisting men on the outskirts (or even inskirts) of the assaults to help, recognising that the line between hero and abuser can be thinner than we often acknowledge and using community accountability in interesting ways. This theme also enables El-rifae to balance her regrets and her pride in ways that enable analysis and also a call to action.
December 15, 2024
One of the most harrowing and brave books I have ever read. El-Rifae resurrects her time as part of a feminist collective during Egypt’s Tahrir Square protests in 2013. She helped organize squads of protectors who would go out and rescue women from gangs of men would form circles and attack them during the mass gatherings.
El-Rifae has several first-hand accounts of women’s assaults that are incredibly hard to read, and the accounts of those attacked while protecting them are only slightly less horrifying. But the clarity, strength, and hope of these people trying to change their country, trying to build solidarity, shines through the awfulness.
If you survive the first third, the book expands to organizing tactics, patriarchy, the lingering impact of trauma, alienation (El-Rifae left for New York after and returns for short, painful visuts), relationships, the difficulty of truly writing about all this. As a reader you can finally let out a breath but the impact of it all, not least the existential angst of male mob violence directed at women, will have you dwelling on this for the rest of your life.
A fantastic, unique, and wonderful work of reportage and memoir that turns over every facet of the dashed hopes of Tahrir while always uplifting the deeply human spirit of it all.
http://lawrencedebbs.home.blog/2024/1...
El-Rifae has several first-hand accounts of women’s assaults that are incredibly hard to read, and the accounts of those attacked while protecting them are only slightly less horrifying. But the clarity, strength, and hope of these people trying to change their country, trying to build solidarity, shines through the awfulness.
If you survive the first third, the book expands to organizing tactics, patriarchy, the lingering impact of trauma, alienation (El-Rifae left for New York after and returns for short, painful visuts), relationships, the difficulty of truly writing about all this. As a reader you can finally let out a breath but the impact of it all, not least the existential angst of male mob violence directed at women, will have you dwelling on this for the rest of your life.
A fantastic, unique, and wonderful work of reportage and memoir that turns over every facet of the dashed hopes of Tahrir while always uplifting the deeply human spirit of it all.
http://lawrencedebbs.home.blog/2024/1...
January 11, 2023
First book of 2023, given to me late last year by a dear friend. It's a gripping text that puts the reader in the middle of a grassroots direct-action movement to combat sexual violence in the public square and support women's participation in public protest during the Egyptian Revolution, but without - as many NGOs do - framing violence "as an issue of class, education, and awareness" with calls for "tougher policing as a remedy." Written as a series of interviews, El-Rifae's visceral narrative never wanders far from the praxis of activism, even as it critical questions the movement itself: "What connected people was the urgency - the hundreds of people that we thought of as some sort of endless resource - actually the only thing we have in common is that we want women not to be raped . . . that's very thin as a common ground." The trans-inclusive story concludes in London, where movement participants encountered are reluctant to talk "with people who aren't already very familiar with what had happened, because of how persistent the racialized tropes around Arab men are." A must read for anyone interested in transnational feminist activism.
May 9, 2023
Ouf.
It feels a bit obvious to say that this book is a lot.
It also feels rare to see these kind of on the ground narratives documented in book form without excessive distancing and theorizing on the author's part.
Extremely powerful and important, but not a book that I would recommend for everyone. It requires having a basic context.
4.5
It feels a bit obvious to say that this book is a lot.
It also feels rare to see these kind of on the ground narratives documented in book form without excessive distancing and theorizing on the author's part.
Extremely powerful and important, but not a book that I would recommend for everyone. It requires having a basic context.
4.5
March 19, 2024
[...] "And the explanation that the state sent these people is too easy, it allows for denial. It creates this picture where there are always the clear bad guys. It's not true. I saw people who were with us on the same front line against the police, and they were harassing women."
[...]
"I think it's from the heart of society." (p.85)
[...]
"I think it's from the heart of society." (p.85)
June 11, 2025
Really interesting and the perfect length for this story. I got a little confused w the characters but she deals with a lot of complex topics aside from women’s oppression/bodily autonomy, the most interesting one to me was the nuance of organizing a grassroots group and managing the ideals vs optics vs practical challenges
January 27, 2024
Heartbreaking and harrowing account of injustice and violence, which is why it was so important to tell. This is such a bold book and I am left with the upmost respect for the author and interviewees who have told this story.
May 19, 2023
fuck!!!
May 20, 2023
3.75 stars
April 15, 2024
(Read for class)
April 22, 2024
Will be writing a longer review soon
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