Part of a comic strip of Deena Mohamed’s character ‘Qahera.’ (Deena Mohamed )On a fine Egyptian day, a woman who walks alone in the street is harassed by a man who has been following her. “Nice curves, gorgeous,” he says, before his hand reaches for her bottom. The woman turns around, and in shock, she screams “Stop him.” Police question her story based on the fact that she’s wearing Western clothes. Cut to a woman in hijab being sexually harassed. She is Qahera, Egypt’s newest superhero and the story does not end well for the harassers.
Qahera is not your typical superhero. For starters, she is a veiled Muslim woman who helps other women in distress, most importantly, in situations involving sexual violence. She carries a sword and has amazing fighting abilities. She is also fed up with misogyny, sexual harassment and “white savior”ideologies.
Qahera is Arabic for Cairo. It also means“conqueror” or “vanquisher.”
“I named her Qahera for several reasons,” says Deena Mohamed, creator of the web comic, which shares a name with its heroine. “Chauvinism, for starters! I sort of wanted to make a reference to Egypt, but Qahera also struck me as a great name because it has so many powerful meanings: vanquisher, destroyer, omnipotent. It’s a great name for a superhero, honestly, especially one who faces as many challenges as she does.”
Mohamed is a 19-year-old Egyptian student and illustrator who wanted to draw a strong female character, one whose buttons are pushed when a woman is mistreated.
In Egypt, 99 percent of women have been sexually harassed, according to U.N. Women. Combating sexual harassment and misogyny through art is one way activists are hoping to change minds and perceptions.
Qahera uses her powers to bring absent justice for women, but Mohamed also felt that she needed to establish that Qahera “was not interested in any white savior ideologies that would inevitably result from it.”
“My personal inspiration has always been my frustration with a lot of things, mainly misogyny. But the trouble is you can’t critique our society without someone else trying to co-opt it and claiming they want to save you, or that you live in a backwards society,” Mohamed says.
To Mohamed, this is how Qahera was born, out of everyday challenges. She is “someone who was willing to take a stand against both the problems we have and people who try to impose their own views onto us.”
“Qahera is basically everything I long to be, and she is modelled after the countless strong women I see every day living their lives despite the challenges they face. Initially I was just hoping to reach Muslim girls who were just as frustrated about issues as I was, but it’s expanded so much that I realized there is a huge gap in representation for someone like Qahera, so I can even hope to reach the people affecting those issues as well as the ones affected by it,” Mohamed says.
Mohamed uses her personal experiences as fuel for her art.
“I think my experiences definitely helped shape my views, because like nearly everyone else in Egypt I have experiences with the kind of discomfort you feel walking down the street, the hyper awareness of your clothes and your appearance, and the sort of feedback you get from people that makes you wary to complain about it,” she says. “I also drew heavily from other people’s experiences (including my friends and other women who have written about their experiences) to help shape the comic. It definitely makes a difference when you know firsthand how it feels, and I think that’s why so many women were able to relate to it so easily.”
Zahrah Adams 