Essay of the week: Does the Middle East need a sexual revolution?

In the same square in 2013, when the military coup removed President Mohammed Morsi, 80 women were assaulted in one day; and in June last year, a woman was subjected to mass sexual assault there following the inauguration of current president, el-Sisi.

For women, these atrocities must surely list among the more disastrous consequences of the Arab Spring, a series of uprisings which began in Tunisia in December 2010, and which had initially been greeted with optimism.

Egyptian journalist Mona Eltahawy believes that the political revolution failed in her country because it was not accompanied by a sexual revolution. In 2011 her tweets about her own assault at the hands of Egyptian security forces, a 12-hour ordeal that left her with both arms broken, went viral. "5 or 6 surrounded me, groped and prodded my breasts, grabbed my genital area and I lost count how many hands tried to get into my trousers," she had tweeted. Later, in 2012, her essay published in Foreign Policy magazine, Why Do They Hate Us?, controversially asked why men hate women in the Middle East.

Now, she has expanded her thoughts into a book, Headscarves And Hymens: Why The Middle East Needs A Sexual Revolution. "I'm convinced," she says, "that this political musical chairs we are having in Egypt will not end unless we have a ground-up social and sexual revolution. How can you have a revolution that frees a country in which 91% of women aged between 15 to 49 have had their genitals cut, in the name of 'female purity'? What country can be free when you have these horrendous figures?"

But what would a sexual revolution in the Middle East consist of? And is there even an appetite for it among the wider population? Eltahawy's book makes clear that such a culture change won't happen easily. There are so many obstacles to overcome, whether they be the language (in which a "girl" is a virgin and a "woman" is someone who has had sex), the clothes (the veil) or the law. "That's why," says Eltahawy, "I dedicated my book to the girls of the Middle East and North Africa by saying - be immodest, rebel, disobey, and know you deserve to be free."

Eltahawy herself received a splurge of hate messages from men and women in response to her Twitter posts about being assaulted by the security forces: "Oh you think that I'm not free because I wear a headscarf?" And: "You want us to be whores?"

Eltahawy describes herself as "an anarchist at heart", a believer in "small, direct actions" and an advocate of "rebelling and disobeying". Her revolution would take place in the home as well as the street, in rebellions against parents and family as well as state. "A lot of the ways that women are kept in line, in my part of the world, are through obedience and conformity. And we have to encourage our young women to disobey and stop conforming to these very strict notions of what a 'good woman' is," she says.

In Egypt, where girls as young as five or six have their genitals cut to control their sexuality, the result is that "we don't own our hymens, we don't own our bodies". In Saudi Arabia, adds Eltahawy, women are treated as children for their entire lives, through the guardianship system that requires that they get a man's permission to do many basic things; and in the United Arab Emirates, a mother is legally obliged to breastfeed her child for up to two years. "What part of our body is ours?" she asks. "How can we have any kind of revolution that talks about the liberation of anybody, if I don't own any part of my body and half of society is not free?"

Eltahawy is not without her critics - many of whom were outraged by Why Do They Hate Us?. Her support for burqa bans inflames many Muslims. They complain that she writes in English (the first published editions of Headscarves And Hymens have been in English, though she hopes Arabic editions will soon come out). Among those who feel uncomfortable with her work, is the Muslim journalist Roqayah Chamseddine, who finds Etahawy's writing "reductionist" and believes that it "caters to a specific audience: primarily English-speaking, based in the US and Europe, and one with very little understanding of the region".

"The main premise of her manifesto is that the 'Middle East'," says Chamseddine, "a term used lazily to more or less unify a disjointed and diverse body of people and cultures, needs a sexual revolution - so what is her plan? She doesn't offer one. And that's been pointed out by many women from the region who have read her work. Tackling extremism is necessary but you don't do it with sensational stuff like this."

Patheos, a multiple-faith website, recently published a round-table discussion of Muslim women discussing Headscarves And Hymens. Their response was predominantly critical. One participant complained that the book was "[Eltahawy's] story and not a call for a sexual revolution for every Muslim woman. And Ms Eltahawy certainly does not speak for millions of women." While most agreed that a revolution was required, they didn't think Eltahawy's book tackled "the more difficult questions of what that revolution entails and how it is to be achieved".

In fact Eltahawy is not the first to call for change. German-Turkish writer Seyran Ates made a similar call in 2009, when she published the book, Islam Needs A Sexual Revolution. The message of her book triggered such a storm of threats and attacks that even now she lives under police protection. Interestingly, Ates met Eltahawy in 2009, and recalls that the author was much more relaxed in her views, more open to dialogue and not so pro burqa ban (which Ates herself was advocating). "I think she must have started believing me that there is some hate against women in the Islamic world and that we need this sexual revolution."

There is no doubt that Eltahawy's assault at the hands of the security forces in 2011 was a transformative moment, not just because it made her so angry, but also because, since both her arms were in casts for three months, she couldn't write. "I realised my body could become a medium that I could use to get my message across. When my arms were still in casts, I promised myself that when I healed I would dye my hair bright red and get tattoos on both my arms as a form of celebrating my survival but also saying, 'I'm here. I've survived and you have not terrorised me into silence.'"

Not everyone likes the very personal nature of Eltahawy's writing, but, as with many activists, it's this candid element that makes her message more compelling. "If I'm calling for a social-sexual revolution the least I can do is to talk about my own journey to this revolution as a way of sharing," she says. "What I've been trying to do is to talk about our right as women to pleasure, to have sex with whomever we want whenever we want as consenting adults."

Both Seyran Ates and Eltahawy acknowledge that there are glimmerings of change already. Indeed, Ates says that a sexual revolution has been bubbling away for "over 20 years in the private life of many people in the Islamic world". She adds: "What I see in Tunisia, in Egypt in Turkey, where I come from, is that people are looking for freedom, they are looking for self-determination, they feel nobody should decide about their sexuality and their private lives."

All too often, she says, people portray such shifts as attempts to copy Western culture, but she believes it's part of a fundamental urge towards human rights. "Everybody in the world has this feeling. No matter which religion, no matter which culture. It's not just a copy, it's the wishes of people to make their own lives and decisions."

Another woman who has campaigned for sexual liberation in the Middle East is Lebanese writer Joumana Haddad, author of I Killed Scheherezade: Confessions Of An Angry Arab Woman and publisher of Jasad, the Arab world's first erotic literary magazine. "Until men accept and respect the fact that a woman owns her body," she writes, "no real revolution will happen in the Arab world."

Eltahawy, who'd lived in the US following her coverage of the Egyptian uprising, returned to Egypt in 2013 partly because she wanted to be involved in this revolution. There, she found new grassroots feminist organisations and started her own consciousness-raising support group where young women gather to talk about their experiences.

One of the most fascinating aspects of her book lies in its accounts of the activism already taking place in Arab countries. Eltahawy describes going to an event in Beirut where two women, openly identifying as lesbian, read from a collection of narratives from LGBT people. She lists the women who have campaigned for legislative changes, including Khadija Riyadi, head of the Moroccan Association for Human Rights, who in 2012 called for the removal of Article 490 of the Moroccan penal code, which punishes those caught having sex outside marriage even if they are consenting adults.

She mentions the small group of Moroccans who in October 2013 staged a "kiss-in" in front of their parliament to support three teenagers arrested for posting Facebook pictures of two of them kissing. And she tells the story of Manal al-Sharif, who was jailed for driving a car and posting a video of herself committing this act of defiance on YouTube. In 2011, al-Sharif organised a campaign in which many women followed her example and uploaded similar videos of themselves driving.

Eltahawy regards herself as privileged. Born in Cairo, she was raised in what she describes as a Muslim "feminist home", and she grew up partly in the UK, including Glasgow. When she was 15, her family moved to Saudi Arabia, and all that she had known was "turned upside down". Her mother, formerly the breadwinner, was not allowed to drive and Eltahawy felt suffocated and thought she was losing her mind - particularly after she was groped twice while on her first Hajj (Islamic pilgrimage). She began to wear a veil because she wanted to hide. "The Islam of Saudi Arabia," she says, "is a religion that considers women the walking embodiment of sin."

For many years, says Eltahawy, shame has forced women who have been assaulted or raped to remain silent. That, she believes, is changing. In the aftermath of the Arab Spring, women like herself are starting to speak out about their experiences. "Because of the sexual assaults that happened especially around the revolution there's a growing determination among women to break that taboo around the shame of sexual assault. In that sense Egypt is rising above other countries in how far we've gone. Street sexual harassment and assault happen everywhere, but it's the silencing through shame that is particularly distinctive."

Eltahawy believes the Arab Spring started something that is "almost irreversible". These days, she is invited to talk in surprisingly conservative places, and receives regular emails from Egyptian men who agree that "patriarchy is a trap". Not everyone, however, believes that the bulk of the populace are ready for such change. Lina Ben Mhenni, a Tunisian feminist quoted in Eltahawy's book, has said: "When people took to the streets in December 2010, it's true they were calling for employment, freedom, dignity. I think they weren't really ready to accept that freedom means all freedoms, including women's freedom, sexual freedom, individual freedom, all freedom. They're not ready for such a revolution."

One of the complaints about Eltahawy is that she seems to be writing for a predominantly Western audience, rather than the people who actually live in the Middle East. It's true that this feels like a book for the global feminist movement, rather than those that participated in the Arab Spring. Among her hopes is that it will "remind everybody that they have to think about misogyny in their own community and not be complacent about it". In other words, the whole world needs a continuing sexual revolution. Its goal? For Eltahawy it is equality for women and men in all areas of life, including the right to pleasure, to owning one's body and what one does with it.

Headscarves And Hymens is published by Weidenfeld And Nicolson, £6.99