Mona Eltahawy: assaulted by Islam... for wearing pants?

I see that journalist Mona Eltahawy was assaulted in Tahrir Square. There's a graphic account with pictures here.

One quote from Eltahawy jumps out at me:

".... I lost count of the number of hands that tried to get into my trousers..."

The thing is: it may be exactly about trousers. Let me explain.  Eltahawy has spoken out against the mistreatment of women in Islam.  Fair and brave enough.  But in calling for better treatment of women, she has signally failed to address the crux of the problem: that mistreatment of women is core to Islamic doctrine.  She's said for example that there's no sanction in Islam for women wearing trousers.  Wrong, Mona.

I recorded back in August 2009 how she had tackled the mistreatment of Muslim women, but had failed to name the reason for that mistreatment, and specifically about wearing "men's clothing":

Mona Eltahawy claims that there is no sanction in Islam for the various “crimes” (her quote marks) such as women wearing trousers, having sex outside marriage and drinking alcohol (“Abusing Women and Islam”, IHT August 15-16).  She is wrong on all counts.

The standard manual of Islamic jurisprudence, the ‘Umdat al Salik  is the accepted authority of all Sunni schools of Islamic, Sharia law (Hanafi, Maliki, Shafi’i and Hanbali).  It is certified, inter alia, by Cairo’s Al-Azhar University, co-sponsor of Obama’s recent speech to Muslims and the chief centre of Islamic learning in the Sunni world.

Of women wearing trousers, it says: “The Prophet cursed men who wear women’s clothing and women who wear men’s clothing.” (p28.1.3). [more...]

It would seem that Eltahawy has been hoist on her own petard, pants in this case.  Naiveness or ignorance of the tenets of Islam is what caught her out.  There's no excuse for her awful mistreatment.  Just that if you're going to call out the abuse of women, you have to tackle what's at the core of that abuse.  Islamic doctrine. If you don't do that, no amount of "Arab Springs" is going to change the fundamental misogyny of Islam.

Note in all the coverage of Tahrir: the extent to which it's (1) Men only and (2) Very Islamic.
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Update: From the The New Yorker, no less!

TAHRIR SQUARE: MEN WITH BEARDS

Tahrir Square was packed Friday. The crowd was as large and dense, with as much pushing and shuffling and squeezing as I have seen since the night Mubarak fell. Most of those present were Islamists, with untrimmed beards and close-shaved mustaches, wearing white knit prayer caps or the red tarboosh and white turban of scholars from Al Azhar, Cairo’s venerable Islamic University. Many, perhaps most, had come from distant governorates, in buses organized by the Muslim Brotherhood and Salafist organizations and parties. Read more...