Three female activists from the Ukrainian-based feminism group FEMEN stripped in a Swedish mosque on Saturday to protest Islamic law in Egypt, revealing painted messages on their bodies, like “No shariah in Egypt and the world” and “My body is mine, not somebody’s honor.”
Employees of the central Stockholm mosque called police, who arrested the women on suspicion of disorderly conduct, The Local reported.
The women told media they appreciated living in a country where being arrested would be their worst punishment.
“If we did that demonstration in my country, we [would get] raped, we’re going to be cut with knives, we were going to be killed,” Egyptian protester Aliaa Magda Elmahdy told the Swedish station AftonBladet.
“We should not be called whores,” another protester told AftonBladet, “or that we are doing something shameful‚ like they were calling us today in the mosque. They were calling us whores, whores from hell.”
According to the FEMEN website, the “sextremists” who “symbolically rid of the black hijabs, in the heart of a place of worship,” were of Egyptian, Tunisian and Swedish descent.
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“I believe that the Egyptian women would rather die than allow the regime Morsi to clothe them in a light-proof bag of Islamism,” said Alia El Mahdi, who led Saturday’s protest.
“FEMEN calls upon the Egyptian women to take an active part in the overthrow of Islamism revenge for centuries of humiliation and slavery… The fire of revolution must burn!” the FEMEN website reads.
• Jessica Chasmar can be reached at jchasmar@washingtontimes.com.
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