Aliaa Magda Blog Photos Controversy

Conservative groups have predictably slammed Aliaa Magda Elmahdy’s photos, but some secular groups have also accused her of playing into conservatives’ hands by making it easier for them to claim that liberalism would be damaging to Egyptians’ cultural values.

In a tweet, she said “I took my nude photo myself in my parent’s home months before I met @Kareemamer [her boyfriend] and I’m atheist since I was 16″. Elmahdy describes herself as an atheist. She has been living for the past five months with her boyfriend, blogger Kareem Amer, who, in 2006 was sentenced to four years in a maximum security prison for criticizing Islam and defaming former president Hosni Mubarak.

In Egypt, where 90 of the population are Muslims, as many as 90 per cent of women wear a head covering called ‘hijab’ required by the religious code ‘Sharia Law.’ Nudity is strongly frowned, even speaking with an unknown Egyptian woman is a breach of etiquette.

While on the other hand, April 6 Youth Movement denies that feminist blogger Aliaa Magda Elmahdy who posed naked in her blog last month is a member of the revolutionary group.

The Egyptian uprising and its aftermath have created strange bedfellows, like all revolutions do. Some of them, like the Salafi Wahhabis and the Gulf-based Shaikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, joined late and may now have more influence than the secular youth who braved the bullets and the torture and the baltagiya.