Normality, Responsibility, Morality: Virginity and Rape in an Egyptian Legal Context
Résumé
This article aims at partly sorting out the problematic interconnections relating normativity and morality. It starts from the presentation of two recent affairs that were raised and discussed in the Egyptian public sphere. On the one hand, the Republic's Mufti gave an interview on the conditions making it legitimate for a woman to restore her virginity. On the other hand, the People's Assembly abrogated the provision of the Egyptian Penal Code that forbade the sentencing of a man who had afterward married the woman he had abducted. In both cases, the discussion turned around the definition of female honor, sexual relationships, and the scope of the power of intervention of legal and religious authorities in defining and regulating them. I intend to show, in a pragmatic perspective, the central character of the idea of normality in the articulation of the norm and morality. Closely scrutinizing the terms of the debate reveals the game of a cluster of ascriptions and anticipations through which the many actors involved in the public sphere build and negotiate a knowledge they consider and present as shared, and hence normal and normative. In other words, I shall attempt to demonstrate that common social knowledge is a construct, while its public construction precisely aims at giving it a predetermined dimension that guarantees its moral and hence constraining weight. However, I shall also try to show that this debate takes place within the frame of a changing pattern of normativity in which the individual is taken as a person responsible for his behavior vis-à-vis the rules of law and morality. In conclusion, I shall see how normality and morality are combined in such a way that it directly affects the public sphere and the political arena.
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