Paternity psychosis

For those who haven't been following this case, Hind El-Hinnawi challenged so-called societal norms by taking the father of her baby (Egyptian TV "personality", Ahmed El Fishawy) to court in order to establish his paternity and force him to acknowledge his rights towards her and her baby, Lina. By doing this, she opened herself to a firestorm of criticism from a society that prefers to sweep such matters under the carpet.

While she probably has no interest in being labeled an icon or lauded for her courage, she's become a symbol for exposing the double-standards that exist in Egyptian society. I hope everything works out for her.

Her most recent hearing adjourned, Hind El-Hinnawi tells Yasmine Fathi about the schizoid society in which we live

On 28 July, the family court adjourned the Hind El-Hinnawi case to 15 September, when witness testimonies will be heard. A young stylist, El-Hinnawi shocked the Arab world by filing a paternity suit against TV actor Ahmed El-Fishawi, claiming they had been in a secret urfi (customary) marriage when she conceived -- and that El-Fishawi held the only copy of the contract proving it. The couple had fallen out, according to her, when El-Hinnawi refused to have an abortion. According to El-Hinnawi's lawyer, Mamdouh El-Wassimi, the suit was filed on 6 November following the birth of their daughter Lina. "Paternity suits cannot be filed until the child is born. So El-Hinnawi filed two reports with the prosecutor -- just to establish that there had been a marriage and that the contract had been stolen." Both El-Hinnawi and El-Fishawi were questioned, and the latter denied any relationship with the former, whether legitimate or illegitimate. Later he conceded that there had been a relationship, which he described as an affair rather than a marriage: "In the end he's free to call it whatever he wants."

Playing with the beautiful Lina in her Muqattam villa, El-Hinnawi, speaking after the hearing, told Al-Ahram Weekly she was frustrated that her name has become synonymous with urfi marriage: "My problem is not the nature of the marriage. There are many officially registered marriages in which the father denies paternity." Nor does she have much tolerance for the view that, for a woman who accepts a urfi arrangement, she deserves to be in this situation: "I didn't have a relationship with thin air. There was a partner involved, and he accepted the same situation. We were both wrong. But why is it always the woman who's blamed?" Yet for her the issue is, rather, admitting, and rectifying, the mistake: "It's a schizophrenic society. Just like thieves who talk about honour, or charlatans who talk about honesty. That's what Ahmed does -- he talks about religious duties even as he disowns his daughter. He's always thinking up an excuse for this attitude, to clear his conscience -- that I'm the one who drove him to behave in this way... Our whole society is living a lie." That, she says, is why she has kept the baby: to assume responsibility for her choices rather than blame them on "circumstances".

While she takes the point that it was naïve to hand El-Fishawi the only existing copy of the contract (allegedly so he would obtain the signature of a second witness to make the contract valid), she still feels it was a matter of trust: "I trusted him with myself. I didn't see why I couldn't trust him with a piece of paper." Another reason she kept Lina, she says, is that she was brought up to be independent. At age eight her mother left to work in Saudi Arabia, while she and her brother stayed behind, in the care of her father -- who would drop them off at the airport or bus station and leave, for example: "Occasionally we did have problems, we would get lost. But we grew up to value the self-sufficiency it instilled in us."

El-Hinnawi has no regrets. Yet, having become the pinup for a social phenomenon, it is impossible to ignore the consequences -- both for her and her family. Led by one uncle, her mother's side of the family has cut all contact, while her father's have grown distant and formal. An ironic twist, as she describes it: it is the latter rather than the former who have Al-Azhar scholars among them; her paternal grandfather was an imam. With the exception of the occasional e- mail wishing her good luck, most of El-Hinnawi's friends have stopped communicating with her: "I don't think it's a matter of thinking what I did was wrong -- they just don't have the strength to stand by me." When her brother proposed to his wife, his in-laws brought up the case, too: "He told them, 'I'm not going to defend my sister, but she didn't invent urfi marriage.'" It is from the public that she senses the greatest support: she will often get the thumbs up from complete strangers. Currently job hunting, El-Hinnawi has hopes of starting a career in the media: "Now I have a baby I can't work till five, the way I used to." For her part Lina is on the waiting list of a nursery: "It's a very good British nursery. I told them, 'look, I have a problem. I don't have a birth certificate for her.' They said, 'Don't worry. And when you get the certificate just bring us a copy.'"

El-Hinnawi is particularly proud of this episode because she was concerned that, on growing up, her daughter would accuse her of giving her a bad reputation: "But then I thought, no, she will understand that I fought for her. I will tell her, 'you are Lina El-Fishawi. It may not be such an honour in itself but it's an honour to have your father's name against all odds." Early during her pregnancy, El-Hinnawi confided, a Muslim Englishman proposed to marry her and offered to give Lina his name: "This would've solved the entire problem, we would even have had British passports. Anyway we would've left the country and been spared all that trouble. Still, I couldn't face the prospect of telling my daughter, 20 years from now, 'Oh by the way your real father is named Ahmed.' It would have been a cop-out." Yet El-Hinnawi does have marriage plans: she wants Lina to have a good father substitute, "someone who will be there for her". After all, she points out, a true father need not be the biolgical father. Aware of the stigma Lina will have to live with, when she starts going to school for example, El-Hinnawi is determined that "she should have the courage".

El-Hinnawi's apparent strength does not always withstand the stress of bearing such a huge responsibility -- from lawyer fees to childcare: "Ahmed on the other hand is working, he's going out and having girlfriends. The only effect this has had on him is that maybe he doesn't sleep too well." Yet she insists that she will use her experience to help other women: already she has thought of establishing "instant courts" for performing DNA tests and delivering birth certificates within days. She is particularly concerned for women from the countryside, obliged to come all the way to Cairo: "Why should a man have the choice to take the DNA test? Why is stealing a house theft, while stealing a marriage contract personal affairs -- even when stealing a urfi paper turns you from a married woman into a..." Overcome, El-Hinnawi's voice trailed off.