Egyptian Women And The Fight For The Right To Work newyorker.com

Almost no one works in an Egyptian clothing factory because she wants to. The teen-age girls are saving for their dowries, and they will quit when they have enough money. Some of the older women are divorced and have children to support. The married ones usually need money badly enough that their husbands have reluctantly allowed them to work. Rania didn’t quite fit into any of those groups. She was married but living apart from her husband when, eight years ago, she started working at the Delta Textile Factory in the city of Minya, a hundred and sixty miles south of Cairo. As long as they were separated, her husband, Yasser, wouldn’t find out. Unhappiness creates its own freedom, although Rania didn’t know that yet. She was twenty-two years old, with acne-scarred red cheeks, full lips, and a black wool hijab that wrapped her face in a small circle and made her appear younger than she was.

On Rania’s second day in the factory, a Romanian-American manager named Elena asked, “Who wants to work in quality control?” Rania had little idea what quality control was, but she boldly raised her hand. Elena was the first foreigner she had ever met. She trained Rania to spot every potential problem in a pair of men’s underpants. If a leg was millimetres too short, or the seams around the crotch didn’t lie flat, a client could reject the order and cost the factory thousands of dollars. Rania developed a preternatural ability to keep the line moving while catching mistakes almost as soon as they happened. Two years after she entered the factory, she was promoted to supervisor, but she never forgot what it felt like to be a newcomer.

Rania’s capacity for work was legendary—bi-mit ragel, as the Egyptians say, “worth a hundred men.” Every month, the factory awarded prizes to its most productive workers; the line she supervised placed first more times than she could count, and the dinnerware sets and kettles she won cluttered her cabinet at home, useless in their abundance. She had a way of attracting notice and charging into conversations. Executives or clients visiting the plant always asked who she was. In her red supervisor’s tunic, silver flip-flops, and wide-legged black trousers (she was often the only woman in the factory wearing pants), Rania moved around the production floor as if she were at home, and in a way she was.

In the summer of 2016, the company’s executives called a meeting of the factory employees and announced that they planned to hire their first local production manager, who would oversee a bloc of ten assembly lines. Such positions had always been held by an expatriate man, but everyone in the meeting immediately turned to look at Rania. Before the meeting, in fact, Ian Ross, the company’s C.E.O. in Egypt, had told Rania that she was being considered for the job. He warned her not to make problems with the other supervisors, with whom she sometimes fought.

“I don’t make any problems,” Rania answered coolly, but inside she felt excited and proud. She was determined to show everyone that she could be the first female production manager in Upper Egypt.

Egypt has made some progress toward gender equality in recent years. Girls and boys now attend school in equal numbers, and Egyptian universities turn out more female than male graduates. Women are marrying later and having fewer children than they did two decades ago. But these gains have not propelled women into the workforce. For every Egyptian woman who works, almost four stay home. The percentage of women in the labor force has remained flat for two decades; among some groups, such as those with college degrees, it has actually fallen. A 2004 World Bank study estimated that, if women in the Middle East worked at the same rates as their peers in other parts of the world, average household income would rise by as much as twenty-five per cent, enough to push many families out of poverty. The Bank also estimated, however, that at the current rate of increase in female employment it would take the region a hundred and fifty years to catch up to the rest of the world.

Resistance to female employment in many parts of the Middle East is grounded in ideas of male dignity. When a woman works, it is often taken as a sign that her husband has failed to take care of her. One of the best-known verses of the Quran says, “Men are the protectors and maintainers of women, because Allah has given the one more than the other, and because they support them from their means.” Marriage entails clear and complementary responsibilities: a man supports his wife, and she, in turn, obeys him. Wifely submission is even written into the Egyptian legal code. A woman who leaves the house or gets a job without her husband’s permission is considered nashiz—rebellious—and forfeits her right to his financial support.

Other obstacles stand in the way of women who want to work. Many women are reluctant to travel far from home on public transportation, out of fear of sexual harassment; they don’t want to spend their days in small workplaces or shops where they will be in close contact with male co-workers or strangers; they prefer to leave work early, to be home in time to cook dinner for their husbands. “It’s not about the wage. It’s really about the working conditions,” Ragui Assaad, an economist at the University of Minnesota who studies labor and development, told me. “If the working conditions are met, women are ready to work in droves. But, if they are not met, very few are willing to work.”

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In the nineteen-sixties and seventies, when Nasser-era policies guaranteed employment to all college graduates, women joined the workforce by the millions. But the public sector, which still employs more than half of all working women—as administrators, clerks, nurses, and teachers—has been shrinking for two decades. Private-sector jobs, which often require long hours and offer few benefits, aren’t as appealing to women. China and India have built dynamic manufacturing sectors that are dominated by female workers, but Egypt’s high-growth industries, which include oil, tourism, construction, and transportation, are mainly the province of men.

Almost every woman I met inside the Delta Textile Factory had to persuade a father or a husband to let her work there. If a woman is tired or has a bad day, there’s often someone at home to talk her into quitting. What can a woman do when it’s not the law or the government that stands in her way but the people who love her most?

When Rania was a girl, she thought that she might be a police officer or a doctor one day. Instead, she got married while still in her teens, as did almost all the young women in her village. Her parents divorced when she was a baby, and her father had gone to work in Iraq. Divorce is common in Muslim societies—according to some scholars, it was ubiquitous even in pre-modern times—but laws and local customs regarding divorce tend to favor men and punish women. When Rania was twelve, her mother remarried, and Rania had to leave home because, by law, divorced women lose custody of their children if they marry again. Rania shuttled between the homes of several uncles; during her middle-school years, they didn’t allow her to attend school and made her work in their construction-materials warehouse. “They wanted to crush me,” Rania said.

A few years later, her father returned from Iraq. Rania went to live with him and his new wife and resumed her studies at a vocational high school. But her stepmother bullied her and made her feel unwelcome. At sixteen, Rania married Yasser, at her father’s insistence. She wasn’t in love with him, but she was relieved to escape from her stepmother. For her wedding, she wore a shimmering orange dress, her eyes deeply outlined in kohl. In photos of the day, she looks sometimes fierce, sometimes scared; occasionally, she stares straight at the camera. Her mother wasn’t allowed to come to the wedding, because local custom forbids a divorcée from entering her ex-husband’s house.

In the years that followed, Rania and Yasser had two children, but the marriage was never happy, and Rania sometimes returned to her father’s house for months at a time. During one of these separations, she started working at Delta.

Her village, Saft Al-Sharqiya, is nine miles south of Minya on the Aswan Western Agricultural Road. The first time I visited, I was surprised to see Yasser waiting for my translator and me at the entrance to the alley leading to their house. He was generically handsome—dark eyes, neat mustache—and wore a gray tracksuit and flip-flops. Rania had told me that they were not on speaking terms, but I guessed that they had reconciled.

We sat on a couch in the front room. Rania was busy throughout my visit—shelling peas, peeling carrots, plucking and frying and roasting two ducks she had killed that morning. Yasser sat in a corner and played a video game on an ancient desktop computer. His mother and sister appeared, one at a time, to talk to me. Neighbors wandered in and stared.

When we were finally alone, Rania said in a low voice, “My husband took a second wife.”

“How is that for you?” I asked her, just as quietly.

She shook her head. “Sa`b.” Hard. Her face wore a tight, pained expression.

Rania pointed at the ceiling. “She lives upstairs. She’s sitting in the next room with his mother and father.”

The second wife’s name was Asmaa. Yasser had married her while Rania was staying at her father’s house; she found out by chance on a visit back to the village. She later returned home, primarily for the sake of her children, and discovered that Yasser and Asmaa had claimed all her wedding furniture. They now occupied the second floor of the family home, with their newborn son and Yasser’s parents. Rania lived downstairs with her son and daughter.

Throughout the long evening, I waited for the second wife to come downstairs to meet me. I wondered how Yasser would introduce her, and what I would say, and how Rania would react. But the second wife never appeared, and nobody mentioned her name. It was clear that she was avoiding us because Rania wasn’t happy with her. It was also clear that Rania and Yasser had not reconciled at all.

Late that night, Rania and Yasser walked me down the alley, toward the main road out of town. A crowd of about fifty men and boys gathered to stare at me, and Yasser hustled me into a nearby house for safety.

The owner of the house, a sheikh with a long thin face and a scraggly beard, peered at Rania. “My wife,” Yasser said.

“Everyone’s saying that you’ve taken a third American wife,” the sheikh replied.

The others in the room laughed. Rania didn’t say a word—her face went blank, but I remembered her pained expression when she told me about her husband’s second marriage. It had happened more than a year before, but the humiliation was still fresh in her mind. To the villagers, it was a joke, passed back and forth by men who didn’t know her.

On a balmy April morning in 2016, a minibus belonging to the Delta Textile Factory pulled into the village of Beni Mahdi, a half-hour drive south of Minya. The area is one of the poorest in the country. Mohamed Hanafy, Delta’s human-resources manager, and Fatma Metwaly, who runs a local nongovernmental organization for women, had come to recruit women to work at the company’s new facility in Minya’s industrial zone.

Twenty-two women sat squeezed together on benches in the front room of a house in the village. Metwaly, who had been hired by Delta to sign up workers, launched into her pitch. “I can see in your eyes that you really want to be independent, and work, and earn your own money,” she said. “Has anyone ever heard of the Delta Factory?”

Delta, which makes clothing and underwear for brands such as Tommy Hilfiger and Calvin Klein, is owned by an Israeli-American businessman and based in Tel Aviv. In 1996, the company established its first plant in Egypt, as a gesture of Arab-Israeli friendship. Through the years, that investment has grown into a vertically integrated operation of six factories where knitting, dyeing, cutting, and sewing are done, but building friendship is harder. Although Egypt signed a peace treaty with Israel in 1979, most ordinary citizens are anti-Semitic and opposed to Israel. So Delta’s Egyptian branch downplays its Jewish parentage, and its employees don’t know who owns it. Or so I’ve been told—the company allowed me to report among its workers on the condition that I never ask them about the ownership of the company.

“As women, we never feel our independence unless we go out to work,” Metwaly continued. “We feel that we have worth and a social community. We have options in life.”

Hanafy outlined the terms of employment. The women would work eight hours a day, with a half-hour break for lunch, six days a week.Their starting salary would be six hundred and fifty Egyptian pounds a month—at the time, the equivalent of seventy-three dollars. The company would provide free transportation and medical insurance. He turned on a laptop and a projector and began showing photographs on one wall of the room—pictures of women sitting at modern assembly lines looked pale and blurry against the rough stone wall.

“The factory is beautiful,” Metwaly said, as the women watched and murmured among themselves. “It’s like the factories you see on television. There are chairs, and everything is automated. Everyone has a uniform, and they are all women, as you see. When you see this in reality,” she promised, “it will be even more beautiful than in the pictures.”

The questions came thick and fast. The women demanded answers and challenged the company’s policies and talked loudly over one another. The room began to feel hot and close. It was hard to believe that such outspoken women had stayed home their entire adult lives.

“If a woman has children in the nursery, how can she leave at six-thirty in the morning?” a woman wearing a black hijab edged in gold demanded.

“Everyone should arrange their lives and manage their timing,” Metwaly answered, as several women debated the opening hours of nurseries.

Do we get paid during the training period?

What about the treatment? Because some people just treat us badly.

Some of us have never worked before. If a woman doesn’t even know how to thread a needle, will they shout at her?

What if I’m pregnant and in the sixth month?

Afterward, I spoke with Nadia Mahmoud, a twenty-one-year-old housewife in a black niqab who had asked the question about pregnancy. She had a three-year-old at home and no work experience, yet she was determined to sign on at Delta. “I’ll try to convince my husband tonight, and then I’ll work until I give birth to my baby,” she told me.

Not one man from the village had attended the meeting, but they would be making the decision about whether their wives and daughters would go to work. Metwaly shouted over the women, “Who agrees to work and will now go home to ask your husbands?” Thirteen of them raised their hands.

A woman wearing a long pink abaya stood up. “I’m leaving now,” she announced. “I’m going to ask my husband and come right back.”

Later I asked Metwaly, “Do the husbands ever get angry at you for stirring up trouble?”

“Yes,” she said. “I meet men who are very severe: ‘Why are you talking to my wife? Why are you making her more aware? We don’t want our women to work. We want them to stay home.’

“We try to play it smart,” she told me. “We don’t talk to the women about their rights—we try to tackle their needs. We say, ‘You need to earn money to help your husband, to support your family, and to take care of your house.’ ” And yet, when she spoke to the women of Beni Mahdi, Metwaly did not take a pragmatic approach. The women all faced economic difficulties—that was why they had come—but Metwaly had appealed to their emotions. She assumed that they wanted to get out of the house, to meet new people, to change their lives.

The next morning, a minibus belonging to the Delta Textile Factory again pulled into Beni Mahdi. More than a dozen women got on. All together, Metwaly’s organization recruited three hundred women in the villages around Minya to join the workforce at Delta. If the conditions are right, as the economist Ragui Assaad told me, women will work in droves.

At seven-thirty in the morning on the second day of Ramadan in 2016, Rania plunged into the flow of production. She walked rapidly up and down two assembly lines—one was her own; the other belonged to a supervisor who had just finished training. The factory had asked Rania to oversee both lines as a test of her management abilities. Ramadan added to the test: for the entire month, workers would be laboring without food or water for seven and a half hours straight. It was the first week of June, and the temperature was forecast to reach a hundred and nine degrees.

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Rania clapped her hands, like a teacher calling students to attention. “Where is Aida? Let’s go. Yella!” The soft whirr of sewing machines started against the deep thrum of the ventilation system and the drone of Quranic verses over a loudspeaker.

At eight-fifty-two, the first casualty of the day: a worker fainted. The young woman leaned back in a chair on one side of the production floor, surrounded by a gaggle of co-workers. When Rania arrived, tears were trickling out of the woman’s eyes. Rania wiped them away with the edge of her headscarf.

“Come on, you’re scaring me,” she whispered, as someone fanned the woman with a production calendar.

The worker was upset because she had been transferred off Rania’s line. Her fainting spell—most likely faked—was a dramatic bid to reverse the factory’s decision.

At nine-thirty, Rania went upstairs for the morning meeting and received her target for the day: six hundred pairs of boxer shorts. At ten-thirty-one, back down on the floor, she was approached by a tearful woman in a long black abaya.

“Why are you crying?” Rania asked. “Did someone upset you?”

“I’m tired,” the woman said.

“What’s wrong?”

“I’m tired.”

In the course of the day, Rania spotted a worker who was about to mix up fabric tapes from two different orders; she located a thousand missing bar-code tags that had been separated from their work bundles; she puzzled over why the legs of the boxers coming off one worker’s machine were not matching up. But sewing clothes in an Egyptian factory is not an exact science. There’s always a piece of fabric that someone has cut imprecisely and someone else has to fix on the fly; someone is usually feeling ill, or something has been misplaced, or needs to be fixed. A good supervisor must persuade workers to adjust for these flaws in the system and still meet their targets.

Between 2004 and 2006, I spent time reporting among young women in Chinese factories. The operating procedure there is straightforward: bosses instruct and workers obey. The work at Delta, however, depended on a web of personal exchanges. Supervisors engaged in negotiations or called in favors to get tasks done; workers complied out of loyalty or refused from spite. The fainting spells, the shouting matches, the crying, the outpourings of emotion—these were the traditional tools that women used in domestic settings where they had little power, imported into a modern factory. Rania often said that the key to motivating workers was to win their love.

At eleven o’clock, she realized that her line was falling behind because her best elastic sewer was on vacation. Absences are common during Ramadan—forty-five per cent of Delta’s workers in the Minya factory didn’t come to work that month, because their families wanted them at home. Rania decided to ask a woman named Doaa to fill in on the elastic machine for a couple of days. Doaa had recently been named a supervisor and did not like the idea of being demoted, even for two days, to sew elastic.

“O.K., I’ll do it,” she said, “but I have to sit at a machine that I like.”

“Watch this,” Rania said to me, quietly. “Now she’ll be very demanding. I have to be very patient with her.”

Doaa took a leisurely tour around the floor, searching for an elastic machine that met her standards, while Rania followed her. Finally, Doaa agreed to work on Rania’s line. Rania spent most of the afternoon sitting behind Doaa, helping to pick out stitches on pieces that needed to be redone. She didn’t have to—she was the supervisor, after all—but this was how she expressed her gratitude to Doaa. When I left the factory, an hour before closing time, Rania was still sitting bent over a piece of fabric, patiently undoing mistakes that had been made by others.

Her line worked two hours past closing time that evening—another negotiation, since supervisors could not order anyone to work overtime. The workers met their target of six hundred pairs of boxer shorts, and Rania maintained her status as the No. 1 supervisor in the Delta factory for one more day.

In the ancient world, Egypt was famous for the freedom of its women. The Greek historian Herodotus wrote, “Not only is the Egyptian climate peculiar to that country and the Nile different in behavior from other rivers, but the Egyptians themselves . . . exactly reverse the common practices of mankind. For example the women attend the markets and trade, while the men sit at home and weave.”

Four thousand years ago, Egyptian women possessed the same legal rights as men, far beyond the liberties enjoyed by women elsewhere in the ancient world. A woman could live independently, contract her own marriage, buy and sell land, file a lawsuit or a divorce, and leave property to whom she wished. On the walls of pharaonic tombs, women are depicted weaving cloth, selling vegetables in the market, and officiating in temples. A woman might even rule as pharaoh—Hatshepsut led Egypt through a long period of prosperity, in the fifteenth century B.C., and Nefertiti ruled as co-regent with her husband, Akhenaten. After Greece colonized Egypt, in the fourth century B.C., many of these freedoms were curtailed.

Women were prominent during the founding of Islam, which came to Egypt in 640, and the Quran is a progressive text for its time, asserting that men and women are equal in their spiritual value and obligations. But there are also verses that value men over women. (The legal testimony of a man is worth twice that of a woman, and sons inherit double what daughters do.) Through time, the judges and imams—all of them men—interpreted Islam to emphasize women’s second-class status, while downplaying the message of gender equality. Practices such as female veiling and seclusion became sacrosanct, even though the Quran does not require them.

Recent scholarship shows a surprising degree of variation in how freely Muslim women lived in the past. The thirteenth-century theologian Ibn al-Hajj railed against women in Cairo who sunbathed on the banks of the Nile or chatted freely with men; in 1438, Sultan Barsbay issued an edict banning women from streets and markets. (It was revoked less than two weeks later.) In his book “Marriage, Money and Divorce in Medieval Islamic Society,” the historian Yossef Rapoport shows that many or most urban women in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries worked for wages, as peddlers, merchants, hairdressers, midwives, or textile-industry laborers. A British traveller to Cairo in the early nineteenth century was surprised to see women at Al-Azhar University, the leading religious institution in the Arab world. “Contrary to the ideas commonly prevailing in Europe,” he wrote, “a large portion of the votaries consisted of ladies, who were walking to and fro without the slightest restraints, conversing with each other, and mingling freely among the men.”

The arrival of the modern age closed off many of these freedoms. In Egypt, a newly industrialized economy, aimed at exporting products to Europe, decimated the cottage industries that had employed women in large numbers. Only men were allowed to work in factories that used steam power and to receive training on advanced machinery. The incursions of colonization—first by the French and then by the British—pushed society in a conservative direction. The customs of veiling and seclusion were practiced more widely, and the codification of family laws stamped out rights that women had enjoyed earlier. In time, the vibrant and diverse tradition of women’s participation in public life was erased. People assumed that women had always lived under severe constraints.

Egyptian society is often reflexively conservative—there’s a suspicion of the outside world and its influences. Young women who go out to work must prove to their families that they are still dutiful daughters, excellent housewives, and pious Muslims. The 2011 revolution was celebrated as a moment of female triumph, because women and men protested together, but it failed to engender change in that most conservative of institutions, the Egyptian family. Adult children still defer to the wishes of their parents; wives obey husbands, even if they disagree with them. A woman may go out into the world, find work, earn money, and develop skills she never imagined that she would have. But her power and status at home may not change at all if her family doesn’t value those things.

As Rania rose in the hierarchy of the factory, she got into more turf battles with other supervisors. On just one day in November, 2016, I watched her spar with various colleagues over worker absences, missing chairs, and production numbers that had been entered incorrectly into a computer. At one point, she engaged in a shouting match with a packing-department head named Asmaa. There was a training session scheduled, and each department was required to send an employee, but Rania had sent one of Asmaa’s workers without checking with Asmaa first. Missing a worker could lead to lost productivity, so the supervisors haggled over the girls like housewives at the vegetable market.

I’m not going to give you anyone! You have three girls and I don’t have any!

Well, you’re from Danshway!

Are you saying I’m from Danshway?

No one could explain where Danshway was, nor why calling someone a native of that place was an automatic insult.

Delta, meanwhile, was turning into an Egyptian success story. Worker turnover slowed and efficiency increased; the company broke ground on a second factory that would double the size of its operations in Minya. The provincial government started using Delta’s experience to attract other foreign investors.

One afternoon in August, 2017, about a year after Rania had been told that she was a candidate for the production-manager post, I was waiting for her at the main gate of the factory. Mohamed Hanafy, the company’s human-resources manager, saw me as he was leaving.

“Who are you waiting for?” he asked.

“Rania,” I said.

“She’s finished,” he said. “She will collect her pay. Today is her last day.”

“What? Rania the supervisor?” I was shocked.

“She was making big problems in the factory,” Hanafy said. “I’ll tell you about it, but not now.”

Rania finally appeared, looking troubled. The factory had accused her of causing conflicts, but she was trying to save her job with the help of an executive who supported her.

The next morning, I met with Hanafy, who said again that Rania had been creating problems.

“She forced two girls on her line to make Sexy Call to a driver,” he told me.

“Make what?”

“Sexy Call.”

The term, in English, had entered the Egyptian Arabic lexicon several years earlier, when a man was taped bragging to a woman over the phone about his sexual stamina. The tape went viral on YouTube, and the caller became a social-media celebrity. The Sexy Caller enjoyed a brief acting career, appearing in commercials and a television serial that aired during Ramadan.

According to Hanafy, Rania had ordered two women who worked on one of her lines to make Sexy Call to a company driver whom she disliked. Rania recorded the conversations for future blackmail purposes.The matter sounded frivolous, but it scared Delta executives. The two women who made the calls were Muslim, both married; the driver was Christian. In 2011, in another part of Minya, two Muslims had been killed and Christian homes and shops set on fire after a disagreement that started over a speed bump.

Rania had initiated other plots against people she disliked, Hanafy told me. She urged two workers to file a complaint against a manager, claiming that he was verbally abusive. She filmed a female worker sitting next to a driver, as supposed proof of her promiscuity. (Sex and videotape seemed to be her weapons of choice.) Hanafy said that he and the factory manager had both warned Rania that she would be fired if she continued doing these things.

He acknowledged that Rania was a good supervisor. “I know that Rania has a difficult life at home,” he told me. “But there is something wrong with her mind. A normal person doesn’t do this. Whatever dirty thing is in the factory, she is involved in it.”

Rania often spoke about the factory in family terms—that she was like a mother to her workers, or that she won their loyalty through love. But Egyptian family dynamics can be poisonous. Several generations often live under one roof, and family members cannot speak openly about what makes them unhappy. Petty fights turn into feuds that drag on for weeks or months. Since she was in her teens, Rania had belonged to three families. On her mother’s side, her uncles exploited her; in her father’s family, her stepmother bullied her. In her own family, her husband had betrayed her by marrying a second wife and making her the laughingstock of the neighborhood. In each instance, she had been hurt and humiliated by someone stronger than she was. It was no wonder that, once in a position of power, Rania played by the same rules.

In November, 2017, I visited Rania at home again. She had not worked since her dismissal from Delta, three months earlier. For a while, she raised chickens to sell, but she gave that up because it didn’t earn much. Yasser tried several times during my visit to sell me archeological artifacts.

Rania denied the factory’s accusations against her. She said that Hanafy disliked her because she stood up for her workers. He envied her success, she said, and had invented those stories to get her fired. She hoped to join a clothing factory that was scheduled to open in the new year. When I asked if she had learned anything from her personal conflicts at Delta, she said, “In the new factory, I want to be more alert and on my guard, so I’ll be aware if someone is plotting against me.”

After dinner, I caught a glimpse of Asmaa, the second wife, who delivered her toddler son into the care of Rania’s children before vanishing again. The boy, Mahmoud, had a round face and pale brown hair in corkscrew curls. “Shaklu wahish,” Rania said: he is ugly. “They shaved off his curls to try to make him look better, but it’s no use.”

Later, the baby cried when he bit into a piece of spicy chicken. “Stupid!” Rania snapped at him. When he fiddled with the knob on a speaker and pulled it off, Rania swiped him to one side with her arm. “Stupid!” she said again.

She was back on speaking terms with her husband; even Asmaa was allowed to show her face downstairs. The adults in the household were managing the delicate act of appearing civil to one another. Rania had apparently decided to take out her unhappiness on one-year-old Mahmoud, the family’s weakest member.

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