BreitBart.com ————–By Simon Kent —————-Fri., Jan. 15, 2021
A Cairo court has accused 20-year-old student Haneen Hossam and 22-year-old Mawada Eladhm of recruiting young women for “indecent jobs that violate the principles and values” of Muslim-majority Egyptian society, the judicial official said.
The motion came just two days after an appeals court had acquitted the two belly dancers and ordered their release.
As Breitbart News reported, last summer the pair were sentenced to two years in prison for posting “indecent” dance videos on TikTok in a fraught case that critics describe as a further crackdown on self-expression in the conservative society.
The women were also fined 300,000 Egyptian pounds (nearly $19,000) each for “violating the values and principles of the Egyptian family,” inciting debauchery and promoting human trafficking, according to a statement from the public prosecutor.
Their case drew the ire of Egyptian feminists who dismissed the prosecution of Hossam and Adham as another example of their conservative society’s encroachment on women’s freedoms.
At the time, women’s rights advocates circulated an online petition describing the arrests as a “systematic crackdown that targets low-income women.”
This is not the first time Egypt has pursued women entertainers for posting online content considered immoral by state-sanctioned Islamic authorities.
