CAIRO — An Egyptian actress facing trial on public obscenity charges for wearing a revealing dress says she didn’t mean to offend anyone and appealed to her detractors to believe in her good intentions.
In a Facebook post late Saturday, Rania Youssef said she may have misjudged how people would react to the dress she wore at the closing ceremony of this year’s Cairo International Film Festival, which revealed the entirety of her legs through embroidered gauze.
“I want to repeat my commitment to the values and ethics we have been raised by in Egyptian society,” said Youssef, whose statement fell short of an apology.
Images of Youssef at the event were widely shared on social media, prompting a group of lawyers to file a complaint to the chief prosecutor, who quickly sent the actress to trial. Youssef is due in court on Jan. 12.
The case is the latest instance of ostensibly secular authorities embracing religious conservatism in Muslim-majority Egypt, where the military in 2013 — then led by current President Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi — overthrew a freely elected but divisive Islamist president.
Egypt’s Actors Guild, meanwhile, said in a statement that it intended to investigate and discipline actors who wore “inappropriate” attire during the opening and closing ceremonies of the weeklong film festival, arguing that they clashed with “the traditions, values and ethics of society.”
Youssef ’s dress and news of her impending trial have dominated the conversation on social media networks over the weekend, made the front-page Sunday of several newspapers and became the topic of several op-eds.
While some on social media invoked religion to denounce the actress’ “immodesty,” others criticized the judicial system for what they saw as bowing to conservatives, noting the lack of progress in redressing what they considered some of society’s more pressing chronic ills, such as homelessness, corruption and the sexual harassment of women.
A Section on 12/03/2018