The Cairo streets where girls pretend to be boys
Published: 12/Jul/2015
Source: The Guardian
Manal and Ahmed don’t look alike. Manal holds her infant son, who plays with the folds of her hijab. Ahmed looms from a photograph behind her, a baseball cap on his head. Manal is a shy young mum, Ahmed an aggressive young man. They seem like different people.
Except, they’re the same person. “That,” says Manal, pointing at the picture of Ahmed, “is me. And my boys’ clothes are downstairs.”
We are in a shelter for homeless women in Fustat, southern Cairo, the oldest district in the Egyptian capital. Not far away stands Cairo’s oldest mosque. A few of the women here, on the other hand, are examples of a much more contemporary phenomenon.
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