Egyptian blogger menaced for nude photo defiling Islamic State flag

Egyptian blogger and feminist activist Aliaa al-Mahdy has once again stirred controversy after releasing a photograph of herself squatting naked and menstruating on the flag of the radical Sunni militant group, the Islamic State (IS).

On Monday, Mahdy, 23, wrote on her Facebook page and Twitter account that she had received death threats such as “Inshallah, your throat got slitted [sic] in the streets with in [sic] days,” after publishing the photo on Saturday.

Another young woman in the photograph has also received threats. The second protester, dressed in a black shirt with her head covered, has her back to the camera as she apparently defecates on the IS flag and raises her middle finger.

The letters ISIS — the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, the former name of the Iraq-based group — are painted in black letters on their bare bodies, while presumably fake machine guns lay on the floor in the background.

As of Monday evening, the photo was no longer on Mahdy’s Facebook page — some media outlets reported that Facebook removed it, while others claimed that Mahdy herself took it down. The photo had not been deleted from her Twitter account, however.

This is not the first time Madhy has elicited international attention for her nude acts of protest.  In October 2011, Mahdy posted a nude self-portrait on her blog, describing the image as an act of protest against rampant misogyny in Egyptian culture, feelings of shame associated with the female body and the endemic of sexual harassment plaguing Egyptian streets.

A year later, in December 2012, Mahdy joined a protest with the FEMEN group outside the Egyptian Embassy in Stockholm, appearing nude with the words “Sharia is not a constitution” written across her torso as she raised an Egyptian flag to protest the Muslim Brotherhood’s domination of the 2012 Constitution drafting process.

Lawmakers from the Muslim Brotherhood and other Islamist groups called for a ban on Mahdy’s return to Egypt, while others pressed for the revocation of her citizenship.

Mahdy has not only drawn fire from conservative and Islamist groups, but from the ranks of feminist and women’s rights groups, as well. The activist has been criticized for her affiliation with FEMEN — a feminist protest group founded in the Ukraine in 2008 and now based in Paris, known for organizing nude protests to draw attention to women’s rights issues. The group has been accused of being Eurocentric and exploiting women’s bodies in the interests of its own self-promotion.

After being physically assaulted in Egypt and threatened with arrest, Mahdy sought political asylum in 2013. She currently resides in Norway.