This is not just about including Saudi women in the London 2012. It’s much more far-reaching and serious than that. It is an issue of silence and concurrence from the international community regarding a nation’s outright breach of international agreements and conventions.
Last Friday Sheikh Al Fowzan, ironically a member of the Saudi human rights commission, stated that the thought that the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) might be implemented in Saudi Arabia makes him shiver in fear and worry. This was during the last day of a three-day conference that took place in Qaseem, a region north of Riyadh. The conference was entitled, 'Women in the Prophet’s tradition and the modern woman: Saudi Arabia a model', and had fifteen countries participating. The assembled company came to the conclusion that Saudi Arabia should withdraw from the CEDAW agreement that it signed in 2000 - a development probably due to the religious establishment’s feeling that the government might cave in to increasing international pressure to allow Saudi women to participate in the upcoming London 2012 Olympics.
Those within Saudi who oppose the inclusion of women reason that although there is nothing in Islam that prohibits women from physical activity or even competitive sports, the future implications and consequences might be unIslamic. A paranoia has overtaken Saudi conservatives as if once a woman officially represents the country, all Saudi women at a stroke will be forced to take part and Muslim women will be parading around in swimsuits and volleyball outfits. They turn a deaf ear to anyone who argues that it clearly states in the Quran in the second chapter ayah 256 that there is no compulsion in religion. This is a nation of about nineteen million Saudis and it is unequivocally unIslamic to force only one narrow puritanical interpretation of texts on all.
Saudi Arabia still has not officially conceded to allowing women to represent them at the Olympics..
http://www.opendemocracy.net/eman-al-nafjan/saudi-arabia-turns-deaf-ear-to-olympic-women
Showing posts with label women's rights. Show all posts
Showing posts with label women's rights. Show all posts
Thursday, 19 April 2012
Saturday, 7 April 2012
How Delhi's policemen view rape: Tehelka investigation
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Sunday, 1 April 2012
1971: The rape survivors of Bangladesh
The Birangana (war heroines) and the birth of Bangladesh - by Laxmi Murthy
The year 1971 was a landmark in Southasian history for many reasons. It included the birth of Bangladesh but also the war fought by Pakistan and India. It was perhaps the only such conflict involving the three most populous Southasian countries, clashing for the first time since the end of colonial rule. High-level politics and the tumultuous times spawned a number of books on war, international relations and human rights. However, an uncanny silence has remained about one aspect of the war – the sexual crimes committed by the Pakistan Army and its collaborators, the Razakar militia, against Bangladeshi women. It is only now, 40 years on, that some of that silence is being broken.Bina D’Costa’s new Nationbuilding, Gender and War Crimes in South Asia takes on the mammoth task of placing violence against women during the war in a larger political context. While what D’Costa calls the ‘original cartographic trauma’ of the Subcontinent has been well researched, gendered nation-building narratives have been given little consideration. Yet D’Costa proposes that any theorisation of nation-building in post-Partition India and Pakistan, or post-Liberation Bangladesh, is incomplete without a gendered analysis. Recognising that women have largely been silenced by state historiography, feminist scholars and activists in Southasia – Veena Das, Kamla Bhasin, Ritu Menon, Urvashi Butalia – have attempted to explore this sordid aspect of war.
That rape has been used as a weapon of war has been well documented. One of the more famous examples is American feminist Susan Brownmiller’s investigation of rapes committed during the two World Wars, in Vietnam and then in Bangladesh, which emerged as the 1975 classic Against Our Will: Men, women and rape. The idea of defiling the enemy population by raping its women and impregnating them, often while their helpless and ‘feminised’ menfolk watch, is based on notions of honour, purity and emasculating the opposition. These notions of defilement also led to the sacrificial killing, sometimes by their own families, of women who had either been raped or even simply exposed to the potential of sexual violence.
These ‘honour’ killings were widespread during the Partition riots of 1947, a phenomenon documented by Bhasin and Menon. Expanding on this theme, Butalia has talked about how women also colluded in maintaining family ‘purity’ by forcing those who had been raped to commit ‘suicide’. The post-Independence ‘recovery’ programme, whereby abducted women and children were sent back to their families, was fraught with problems, precisely because of prevalent notions of desecration and impurity, which hindered acceptance by families and communities. We see a similar drama played out with the birangana, or rape survivors, and war babies of 1971...
Psychiatrist Ruth Seifert defined rape not as an aggressive manifestation of sexuality but as a sexual manifestation of aggression. Her study of sexual violence during World War II exposed a hitherto little-known side of that period. Seifer writes:
Soldiers of Nazi Germany also committed rape on a massive scale. It is furthermore known that the Wehrmacht ran brothels where women were forcibly made to work. In the Eastern territories the Wehrmacht used to brand the bodies of captured partisan women – and other women as well – with the words ‘Whore for Hitler’s troops’ and to use them accordingly.
Helke Sander and Barbara Johr, in their research on the mass rapes of German women by Red Army troops at the end of World War II, allege that between April and September 1945, nearly 110,000 of Berlin’s 1.4 million female residents were raped, and about 1000 infants were born as a result. While many have criticised Sander and Johr’s methods, it is undeniable that rape was part and parcel of the strategy of the victorious army to subdue the once-ascendant community. The silence around this aspect of the war also follows a pattern of denial evident in wars throughout history.
Sexual violence and rape during conflict have only recently been recognised as war crimes in international law. Women’s experiences of sexual violence and rape in Rwanda, Bosnia and Congo were classified as war crimes and as crimes against humanity. Feminist scholars such as Kelly Askin re-reading the Nuremberg and Tokyo trials following the genocide of Jews during World War II have highlighted the failure of the international community to prosecute gender-specific crimes.
Sunday, 12 February 2012
Women on the left: Alexandra Kollontai
The life and legacy of Bolshevik Revolutionary and feminist Alexandra Kollontai:
Kollontai was born in 1872 into a privileged although fairly liberal background, her father a Tsarist general and her mother’s family wealthy timber merchants. She first began to oppose the restricted position of women in the Russian empire of the time by arguing against her mother as a teenager for her need of an education. She won the battle of wills, being allowed to undertake a certificate of teacher training. In 1893 she married for love, but she would later admit this was also a protest against her family who opposed the match.
Initially Kollontai became aware of politics through contact with radical liberals, impressed by their statement of belief in the emancipation of women through education. However, during the women’s textile workers strikes of 1896 upon accompanying her husband on an inspection of a large textile factory, she was shocked to discover the body of a young boy and was appalled at the conditions of ordinary women workers. Kollontai became convinced of the need to overthrow capitalism and that the subjugation of women was tied not just to their subjugation to men, but ultimately to the capitalist mode of production.
As time passed Kollontai felt more and more trapped by her marriage, which left her little freedom to pursue her own interests. She increasingly spoke of the capture of women in domestic subjugation. In 1898 she left her husband to study political economy in Zurich. During this trip she undertook an in-depth study of the works of Marx and Lenin as well as those of Luxemburg and Kautsky. Before returning to Russia in 1899 she visited London and was introduced to Sidney and Beatrice Webb, but rejected their reformist ideas.
Following her return to Russia, Kollontai joined the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (RSDLP) and became an important revolutionary agitator and writer. She was neutral through the 1903 split into the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks although from 1904 she officially joined and worked for the Bolsheviks. She would subsequently leave again in 1908 due to the Bolshevik refusal to take part in the Duma, which she argued was undemocratic but a potential platform for left agitation. She participated in the 1905 workers procession to the Winter Palace which ended in the Bloody Sunday Massacre and was prominent throughout the 1905 revolution agitating and arguing alongside Trotsky for a positive attitude towards the emerging Soviets which she regarded as the bud of a true workers democracy.
Although history has remembered her primarily for her work on the women’s question, at this time she was a widely regarded political economist and expert on the Finnish question. In 1906, under a wave of Tsarist repression, Kollontai published a collection of articles on Finland and Socialism for which she was accused of calling on armed insurrection against the state and fled to Germany to avoid arrest.
It was during this period that Kollontai first began to systematically develop her understanding of the women question, in particular in her 1909 work ‘The social basis of the Woman question’. Along with other women she felt that the issue was denigrated by many on the left and seen as secondary to the ‘real’ class struggle or even dismissed as a bourgeois deflection. She agreed with the Marxist argument that women would not be emancipated solely by the legal and political equality demanded by the mainstream women’s movement. However, equally she argued that a revolutionary party must organise and relate to the particular needs of women as part of the working class and that this must be central to the work of all revolutionaries...
Saturday, 17 December 2011
Robert Fisk: The adventures of Tintin in Beirut
We are all haunted by war.
The First and Second World Wars continue to hold us in their sticky embrace. The Lebanese are still trying to shake off the Christian-Druze massacres of 1860, let alone the 1975-1990 civil war. And there's a fascinating view that the events which lead to war somehow enter our bloodstream, become part of us, a history that goes round and round inside our bodies for ever. Most Lebanese regard the start-line of their civil war as the Christian Maronite Phalangist attack on a bus-load of Palestinians in the Beirut suburb of Ain el-Remmaneh, a red and cream American school bus – actually made at Kew in England – that now lies rusting in a field in southern Lebanon, registration plate long torn off but bullet holes intact and ghosts still aboard.
In an article headlined "Ghost Generation", the Lebanese writer Fifi Abou Dib has intriguingly recreated the last seconds of peace in Lebanon, the driver of the red and cream bus drawing on his cigarette – we don't know if, indeed, he smoked – annoyed at the traffic jam in which he found himself. "The tragedy of the bus at Ain el-Remmaneh is written in our collective history, for sure. But more than anything else, it has infected our DNA." It's true. Art galleries in Beirut often carry symbols of the bus, red and cream, a 1960s Fargo, mass grave to 27 men and women.
Yet only this last October did the Lebanese hold their first seminar on the events of the Christian-Druze war which broke out in the Metn and Chouf mountains 115 years before the bus massacre at Ain el-Remmaneh. And it was Dima de Clerck, doctoral graduate of the University of Paris 1, who drew attention to the connections between 1860 and 1975. "We are in the presence of two traumatic histories which feed on each other," she said. "...The recent war, which happened out of the blue but for clear socio-political reasons, resurrected the memory of 1860, brought it back to life... the history of that conflict, so badly neglected at the time, provoked Christians and Druze to take up arms in 1975, one side taking revenge for a past regarded as shameful, the other (wanting) to gain the political victory which their military success did not obtain for them in 1860."
This is not unlike the aftermath of the 1914-18 war when the victors, including the Brits, came to the conclusion that the War to End All Wars meant that humans must never engage in such a conflict again – while the losers believed that only another war could justify the effusion of blood suffered by the German nation...
..The last-minute cancellation at a Beirut film festival of Persepolis, the animated award-winning movie about a girl growing up in Iran after the Islamic revolution, for example; it was widely rumoured that the Iranian embassy had expressed its displeasure. And then came the weird disappearance of Steven Spielberg's name on the billboard for his The Adventures of Tintin: the Secret of the Unicorn at a cinema in (largely Christian) east Beirut.
Surely the Beirut security authorities had nothing against Tintin. Indeed, they denied any involvement in placing the crude strip of black masking tape over the director's name. The local film distributor blamed an individual cinema proprietor for this act of censorship, although, when I visited the place, Spielberg's name was still hidden by tape. Was this because Spielberg made Schindler's List, about the German who saved thousands of Jews from the Holocaust and which ends as Jewish survivors mourn at Schindler's Jerusalem grave? Or was it because Spielberg, whose Munich – and its theme of purposeless revenge attacks by Mossad – was widely admired in Beirut, is Jewish?
This violation of free speech – for that is what it was, along with the cancellation of Persepolis – cannot be seen in isolation. Infinitely more serious is the new Lebanese law to protect women from domestic violence. It hasn't gone before parliament yet but it is, for the most part, supported by the Christian community. Not so the Sunnis. Muslim authorities in Lebanon have opposed the project and the Dar al-Fatwa has actually refuted the text which – and I quote – "strikes a blow at Muslim women" and "cancels laws which are provided for married couples by religious courts".
One of the nine parliamentary members working on the new law says that, for Sunni Muslim clerics, "encouraging women to struggle against violence is to encourage them to abandon the conjugal home and thus break up the family". Yipes! The legal article on rape by a husband was also criticised because – in the words of the Lebanese MP – "Islam didn't recognise this form of aggression because it regards the man as responsible for his wife".
As the Dar al-Fatwa statement actually says, "this project, which applies to a Western mentality, does not correspond to the values (sic) of our society" because "it endangers the traditional nuclear family" and "denies a father the right to educate his children – and especially his daughters – who need his protection". Shia Muslim authorities, I'm sorry to say, also denounced the law as "a dangerous business".
Dangerous indeed. If men can still rape their wives and exercise censorship in a civilised nation of educated, cultured people, is it any surprise that violence still haunts the land?
Friday, 2 December 2011
'Honour' crimes against women in UK rising rapidly, figures show
The number of women and girls in the UK suffering violence and intimidation at the hands of their families or communities is increasing rapidly, according to figures revealing the nationwide scale of "honour" abuse for the first time.
Statistics obtained under the Freedom of Information Act about such violence – which can include threats, abduction, acid attacks, beatings, forced marriage, mutilation and murder – show that in the 12 police force areas for which comparable data was available, reports went up by 47% in just a year.
The figures, shared with the Guardian by the Iranian and Kurdish Women's Rights Organisation (Ikwro), also reveal that a small number of forces – including four in Scotland – are still not collecting data on how often such violence occurs.
The 39 police forces that gave Ikwro figures recorded 2,823 incidents in 2010. Ikwro estimates that another 500 crimes in which police were involved were committed in the 13 force areas that did not provide data.
But this is likely to be only the tip of the iceberg, campaigners say, as so many incidents go unreported because of victims' fears of recriminations. Jasvinder Sanghera of victim support group Karma Nirvana said the real figure could be four times as high...
Ikwro's campaigns officer, Fionnuala Ni Mhurchu, said the increase was probably due partly to better police awareness and to more victims coming forward after coverage of high-profile prosecutions, but that violence itself was also increasing as young people increasingly refused to bow to their families' demands.
"They're resisting abuses of their human rights such as forced marriage more and more," she said. "And as a result they're being subjected to this kind of violence. We hear from the community that this violence is on the increase.
and for Middle-eastern women: http://ikwro.org.uk/
Saturday, 26 November 2011
Kate Bolick: why marriage is a declining option for modern women (and a riposte, see below)
'...That we would marry, and that there would always be men we wanted to marry, we took on faith. How could we not? One of the many ways in which our lives differed from our mothers' was in the variety of our interactions with the opposite sex. Men were our classmates and colleagues, our bosses and professors, as well as, in time, our students and employees and subordinates – an entire universe of prospective friends, boyfriends, friends with benefits, and even ex-boyfriends-turned-friends. In this brave new world, boundaries were fluid, and roles constantly changing.
In 1969, when my 25-year-old mother, a college-educated high-school teacher, married a handsome lawyer-to-be, most women her age were doing more or less the same thing. By the time she was in her mid-30s, she was raising two small children and struggling to find a satisfying career. What she'd envisioned for me was a future in which I made my own choices. I don't think either of us could have predicted what happens when you multiply that sense of agency by an entire generation.
But what transpired next lay well beyond the powers of everybody's imagination: as women have climbed ever higher, men have been falling behind. We've arrived at the top of the staircase, finally ready to start our lives, only to discover a cavernous room at the tail end of a party, most of the men gone already, some having never shown up – and those who remain are leering by the cheese table, or are, you know, the ones you don't want to go out with...'
'..For thousands of years, marriage had been a primarily economic and political contract between two people, negotiated and policed by their families, church and community. It took more than one person to make a farm or business thrive, and so a potential mate's skills, resources, thrift and industriousness were valued as highly as personality and attractiveness. This held true for all classes. In the American colonies, wealthy merchants entrusted business matters to their landlocked wives while off at sea, just as sailors, vulnerable to the unpredictability of seasonal employment, relied on their wives' steady income as domestics in elite households. Two-income families were the norm.
Not until the 18th century did labour begin to be divided along a sharp line: wage-earning for the men and unpaid maintenance of household and children for the women. Coontz notes that as recently as the late 17th century, women's contributions to the family economy were openly recognised, and advice books urged husbands and wives to share domestic tasks. But as labour became separated, so did our spheres of experience – the marketplace versus the home – one founded on reason and action, the other on compassion and comfort. Not until the postwar gains of the 1950s, however, were a majority of American families able to actually afford living off a single breadwinner.
All of this was intriguing, for sure – but even more surprising to Coontz was the realisation that those alarmed reporters and audiences might be on to something. Coontz still didn't think that marriage was falling apart, but she came to see that it was undergoing a transformation far more radical than anyone could have predicted, and that our current attitudes and arrangements are without precedent. "Today we are experiencing a historical revolution every bit as wrenching, far-reaching, and irreversible as the Industrial Revolution," she wrote...'
Read more: http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2011/nov/27/kate-bolick-women-marriage-relationships
Read a rejoinder: Single women: an American obsession
There are many things one can say about how feminism has affected women's attitudes to marriage but one theory of Bolick's exemplified a certain attitude that makes so many depictions of marriage in the media here feel so retrograde. "American women as a whole have never been confronted with such a radically shrinking pool of what are traditionally considered to be 'marriageable' men – those who are better educated and earn more than they do. So women are now contending with what we might call the new scarcity." Yes, we might call it that, if one could only countenance consorting with men who earn more than oneself.
This weirdly monetised and loveless view of marriage in America will not surprise anyone who has gawped at the "Vows" section in the New York Times' Sunday edition. Photos of grinning couples sit atop detailed descriptions of not just their jobs and social standing ("Mr Jaeger, 28, works at Markit, a financial information services company in Manhattan, for which he heads product development for the index, exchange-traded-funds and research-data businesses," read one typically romantic entry from this weekend) but those of their parents ("His mother is a member of the board of trustees at the Jewish Museum of New York," another entryassures readers.) To read this section is like reading a satirical chapter of an Edith Wharton novel without a punch line, yet it is an established part of the paper, probably best known here for its appearance in an episode of Sex in the City, in which one of the characters frantically tries to be featured in it.
Clearly, Vows is no more representative of New York – let alone America – as a whole than Bridget Jones's daily life was of Britain, but it does reflect an attitude that plays into the fascination the American media has in single women. Such is the popularity of investigations into the enthralling mystery of single women that these articles are pretty much their own genre of journalism in America, characterised by gloomy warnings about the dangers of feminism, cod anthropological claims, regrets about leaving a nice man because the writer wanted an unspecified "more", self-flagellation dressed up as "honesty" about feminism and they are always – always – written by a woman.
Bolick's piece is a perfect example of this, as was Lori Gottlieb's similarly hoo-hahed 2008 article Marry Him!, also published in the Atlantic. The reason they attract so much attention is because the media love any stories that suggest independent women will be punished and because many women readers, in my experience, glob on to articles that voice their worst fears. Read more:
Sunday, 20 November 2011
Legal action taken against Egypt “nude revolutionary” activist
Islam in danger from women's bodies: CAIRO: The first legal move against the nude revolutionary pictures have occurred as the Coalition of Islamic law graduates filed a case against activist Aliya Magda al-Mahdy and her boyfriend, and blogger, Kareem Amer, on Thursday accusing them of “violating morals, inciting indecency and insulting Islam.” The report, which was submitted to the general prosecutor, said the activist published a nude picture of herself “trying to spread her obscene ideology through the nude pictures.” The report was published in full on the coalition’s Facebook page, called for Mahdy and Amer to be punished according to Islamic law.
Aliya Mahdy
“The old constitution and the new declarations of the new one says Islamic law is the source of governing, therefore we asked for Islamic law penalties to be executed on the two bloggers,” Ahmed Yehia, coordinator of the coalition told Bikyamasr.com. “It is an insult to the revolution as these two persons who pretend to be one of the revolutionists and asking for sexual freedoms, they are giving the uprising a bad name,” he continued.
“It is our duty to fight corruption and this is a corruption case, we people who are trying to corrupt society with foregion and unacceptable customs like the sexual freedom they ask for,” continued Yehia. Amer had been in the spotlight a few years earlier in Egypt, spending time in jail after he was charged with insulting Islam in one of his blog posts.
Some comments on the above article:
1./ I do not agree with what this young woman has done, and I would never do the same. but WHO ARE YOU to decide what she should and should not do? if she wants to post naked pictures of herself then be it! I wish to live in a country where people only focus on themselves and stop caring what other people do. LIVE AND LET LIVE. The girl didn't shove the pictures in your face. If you don't want to see them THEN DON'T. - AHMED
2/. This girl did the right thing. I respect her 100%. She is brave and her image says much more than nudity... I am an Egyptian girl, and I have been sexually harrassed/ approached dozens of times in Egypt.. by policemen (pretending to question me); taxi drivers; even teachers!!! My mother always warned me of walking outside at night- and I am 30 yrs old!
I agree with her. The Egyptian streets are full of men who look down at women, disrespect them, and ready to molest them at the first given opportunity. WHAT'S WORSE is that when you complain to police, they laugh it off- because you are a woman. Although I have left the country a few years ago, I hope things change soon for Egypt. It's full of sexists, narrow-minded extremists, islamists- not a healthy environment at all. LAILA
I agree with her. The Egyptian streets are full of men who look down at women, disrespect them, and ready to molest them at the first given opportunity. WHAT'S WORSE is that when you complain to police, they laugh it off- because you are a woman. Although I have left the country a few years ago, I hope things change soon for Egypt. It's full of sexists, narrow-minded extremists, islamists- not a healthy environment at all. LAILA
3./ I want to say to Mr Yehia, please think before speaking nonsense. You could type "nude girl" in Google picture search and have more than 9 million search which is reachable through any Egypt's ISP. Why would you like to lash only one girl from these 9 million at least? And with all due respect, who the fuck are you to think/decide for the whole society? AHMED ZIDAN
4./ Mr Yehia, should go back to Saudi Arabia!!! I am a muslim and I support freedom for everyone nude or veiled.
Saudi women are already forced to wear a loose black dress and to cover their hair and in some areas, their face, while in public or face fines or sometimes worse, including public lashings. The announcement came days after the Saudi newspaper al-Watan reported that a Saudi man was admitted to a hospital after a fight with a member of the committee when he ordered his wife to cover her eyes. The husband was then stabbed twice in the hand.
The CPVPV is Saudi’s Sharia, Islamic law, executive arm and was founded in 1940 to ensure Islamic laws are not broken in public, yet over the years, the committee has been largely criticized over its human rights violations. In 2002, the committee refused to let female students out of their burning schools in Mecca for “not wearing the proper head cover,” which contributed to a large number of dead.
15 young girls died in the fire and dozens more were injured. The CPVPV men banned the firemen and policemen from accessing the girls as “it is not okay for girls to be seen without their full Islamic dress in front of strangers.”
The committee, which only accepts and trains volunteers, has questionable powers on the Saudi street, as they operate under the supervision of the King himself. A Wikileaks document released last year mentioned that “wild Western-style parties” are regularly held at royal palaces in Jeddah, away from the reach of the committee, who stands helpless against any royal violations.
Friday, 18 November 2011
Nude photo of Egyptian blogger is a scream against Islamism
From Maryam Namazie's blog: Student, atheist and blogger, Aliaa Magda Elmahdy, 20, posted naked pictures of herself on her blog to show her “screams against a society of violence, racism, sexism, sexual harassment and hypocrisy”. Showing her body particularly at a time when Islamists in Egypt are trying to secure power is the ultimate act of rebellion. Don’t forget Islamists despise nothing more than a woman’s body. In case you didn’t know, women are the source of corruption and chaos and must be covered up at all times and not seen and not heard.
The Islamists in Egypt, for example, have replaced the photos of their female candidates with flowers and covered up a statue of mermaids in Alexandria. They have refused to appear face-to-face with female TV hosts, unless the presenter put on a headscarf or a barrier was placed between the two! Soon there will be nappies on donkeys and birds will have to stop singing but that must wait until they have put women in their places.
But we mustn’t let them.
Elmahdy’s blogger boyfriend Kareem Amer (who by the way spent four years in jail for calling Mubarak a symbol of tyranny) posted on Facebook: “I think we should not be afraid of those in power or Islamists, as much as we should be worried of politicians claiming to be liberal. They are ready to sacrifice us to avoid tarnishing their image.”
Hear, hear! Now do you really need any more reasons for defending Aliaa Magda Elmahdy unconditionally? Do it now.
***
Tweet with hashtag #NudePhotoRevolutionary, support her Facebook page, and blog.If you haven’t done so, you should sign the Manifesto for a Free and Secular Middle East and North Africa. Secularism, the separation of religion from the state, is a precondition for minimum freedoms and rights for all.
'...There are plenty of progressive views around, but in reality life is difficult for liberal-minded women in Egypt. Women are too often the scapegoats for the ills of society. Take Amr Derrag, the head of the Freedom and Justice Party in Giza – the offshoot political party of the Muslim Brotherhood – who told me recently that the societal problems facing Egypt in the past three decades are “directly related to women not staying home and building the family.”
Not only is this assumption wrong, and scary – the FJP wants to push women back into the home – it shows that the problems facing Egypt socially are being pinpointed and put on women. There are many examples of women being “protected” from men in the Middle East. One would think that the rise of ultra-conservatism, namely the Salafi project emanating from Saudi Arabia, would be more tolerant of Islam’s historical support for women’s rights and their mobility in public – think of the era of the prophet and the openness of that society. The prophet was adamant that all people were welcome in Medina and that women were to be treated with the utmost respect. At the time, unlike today, there was no sexual apartheid in the mosque, with men and women praying together in a show of unity. Now, what we are witnessing is the rise of a movement that is as vehemently anti-women as it is anti-progress.
“Whenever the conservatives enter a society they don’t talk politics or economics, they talk of the honour of women”, said Hibaaq Osman, the founder and chair of the women’s organisation El Karama, in a previous interview. She argues, rightly, that what is important to these conservatives – and she is quick to point out this is not a problem limited to Islam – is that women are the key to society. She added that in all societies, women are the building blocks of forward thinking. She believes that once women have shaken off the need for a male guardian and have entered the workforce, then freedoms and laws against sexual violence can be implemented for the betterment and progress of society...'
and: Egyptian Feminist Creates Firestorm By Posting Nude Photos Online
Thursday, 17 November 2011
Gloria Steinem: 'I think we need to get much angrier'
The last person to interview Gloria Steinem for the Observer was Martin Amis, in 1984. He waited for her at the offices of Ms, the magazine that she co-founded in 1972 – "Pleasant though I found it, I was also aware of my otherness, my testosterone, among all this female calm" – and then they headed out together to Suffolk County Community College, Long Island, where Gloria was, as ever, to address a group of students. To read this piece now is excruciatingly embarrassing, especially given Amis's more recent conversion to what he likes to call the "gynocracy".Feminism? From the male point of view, he said back then, the reparations look to be alarmingly steep. As for Steinem herself, she is "the least frightening" kind of feminist, being possessed of – prepare to be amazed! – both a sense of humour and good looks. She was, he wrote, relief slowly blooming, "nice, and friendly, and feminine... the long hair is expertly layered, the long fingers expertly manicured. Fifty this year, Ms Steinem is unashamedly glamorous."
A quarter of a century later, and Steinem is still glamorous: wildly so. But the point is surely that this glamour derives, just as it always did, as much from her extraordinary career – in other words, from her brain – as from her appearance (Mart unaccountably failed to spot this). At 77, she remains tiny of waist and big of hair – and, yes, the nails are as smooth and as shiny as a credit card – but what strikes you most, at least at first, is how preoccupied she seems. She is so busy. It has taken me the best part of two years to bag this slot with her, and even now I'm here, I'm uncertain how much time, in the end, she will have to spare. Does she remember who I work for? I can't tell. I have the impression that she believes I live in New York – and sure enough, when I eventually tell her that I've flown in from London, she looks first amazed, and then, quickly, solicitous. (She might be distracted, but Steinem is also famously nice.)
We are in her flat on the Upper East Side, a womb-like, slightly hippyish basement stuffed with velvet cushions and piled polemics (my going away present, plucked from one of these piles, will be a slim volume by her former Ms colleague, Robin Morgan, called Fighting Words: A Toolkit for Combating the Religious Right). It's a swanky address but, as she points out, she bought it aeons ago, when even such lowly forms of life as political activists and freelance journalists could still afford a piece of Manhattan real estate. In one corner of the sitting room is her desk, lit by a single lamp; in the other, the desk of her assistant, Amy, who also sits beneath a neat halo of light. Here, two sunbeams in the troglodytic gloom, they drink Starbucks, fire off emails, write books, and generally plan the next stage of the revolution. Visitors like me, though welcomed with pomegranate juice and, when this is discovered to have run out, coconut water, are an unwelcome distraction from the main event, which is work. "I hope to live to 100," she says. "There is so much to do."..
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