When Revenge Passes for Empowerment

By Tahani Elghazaly
Published October 27, 2026

Latest news on WhatsApp أجدد الأخبار على واتساب

By Tahani Alghazaly

A woman who has been betrayed deserves more than a choice between suffering quietly and making someone else suffer. Yet discussions of revenge dramas can leave little room for anything else. Endurance is dismissed as weakness; calculated cruelty is applauded as strength. Recovering a life becomes less compelling than wrecking another.

That is my concern about the response to Tale’ Nazel, starring Mona Zaki as Noura, a woman who discovers that her husband has secretly married someone else and is expecting a child with her. Noura’s hurt is understandable. It does not follow that everything she does with that hurt deserves our approval.

Betrayal can unsettle a person’s understanding of an entire relationship. Memories acquire different meanings. Decisions made in trust become painful to revisit. Wanting the other person to feel that pain is a recognisable human impulse. Turning it into an ideal of female empowerment is another matter.

A woman can confront deception, demand accountability and leave a relationship that no longer offers safety or trust. None of those choices is easy. They deserve as much dramatic attention as an ingenious scheme to humiliate a partner. Her strength should not depend on how thoroughly she can destroy him.

Fairness also requires a distinction between depicting revenge and endorsing it. Zaki has said on Tafa’olcom that she personally dislikes revenge and believes it harms the person pursuing it. Shahid’s synopsis itself raises the possibility that everyone will lose. My criticism concerns the celebration of cruelty as victory, rather than an assumption about the filmmakers’ intentions or the story’s eventual conclusion.

My understanding of Islamic ethics places justice at the centre of this question. The Qur’an instructs believers not to let hostility lead them into injustice. It recognises proportionate redress while commending forgiveness and reconciliation. Being wronged does not grant unlimited permission to wrong someone else.

Those principles must never become a means of silencing a betrayed woman. Forgiveness cannot be demanded to preserve appearances, and protecting a marriage cannot require her to accept continuing harm. She deserves practical support, protection of her rights and respect for her decision, including the decision to leave.

I am not claiming that a television series determines its audience’s behaviour. But the values we applaud deserve scrutiny. Why is an act of retaliation so readily recognised as a triumph, while the courage required to rebuild receives less attention?

I want a more expansive future for the woman at the centre of the story: the freedom to make decisions for herself, the support to recover, and days no longer organised around the man who deceived her. A life spent engineering his pain still gives him an extraordinary claim on her time. She deserves the chance to reclaim it.