Leaderless but Powerful
Updated January 27, 2011, 11:20 PM
Mona Eltahawy is an Egyptian-born columnist and public speaker on Arab and Muslim issues based in New York. She is on Twitter as monaeltahawy.
That sound you hear on the streets of Egypt where thousands have been protesting, is the sound of years of rage at the corruption and repression of Hosni Mubarak's regime. But more important, it’s the sound of the future: young Egyptians have kicked down the door of fear and demanded to be heard.
Who leads them? The beautifully short answer is: no one. What use have leaders been to them? The majority of Egyptians are younger than 30 and, therefore, have known no other president than Mr. Mubarak who has essentially kept the country in a state of emergency for three decades. And who are the opposition leaders? When they’re not striking deals with the Mubarak regime to ensure a few seats in Parliament, opposition parties and their leaders in Egypt have been as useless as that regime in offering youth any kind of hope.
So it’s not any wonder that "Generation Facebook" -- as nimble in the real world as it is in the virtual one -- has leapfrogged over the old men of Egyptian politics and pulled off what no one has been able to in Egypt for decades: street protests that have drawn thousands of Egyptians from every background you can imagine.
Watching their Tunisian counterparts topple their country’s president of 23 years -- Zine El Abidine Ben Ali -- set young Egyptian hearts on fire. Tunisians rose up against Mr. Ben Ali without a leader and that is quickly becoming the cleanest and purest form of civil resistance to dictatorship in the Arab world.
Naysayers are looking for Islamists in the soup, so to speak. But while Islamists have indeed joined the protests in Egypt, they are by no means leading it. And now that opposition figurehead and Nobel Laureate Mohamed ElBaradei has returned to Egypt, young Egyptian protesters both welcomed him home and reminded him who put those people in the streets.
While it might be more palatable for Egypt’s major Western allies like the United States and Europe to see Mr. ElBaradei instead of the Islamists of the Muslim Brotherhood as an alternative to Mr. Mubarak, Egyptians will not accept a Mubarak-lite.
It remains unclear where the armed forces stand on all this. Th protesters know the risks. But knowing the risks and taking them is the point. Just as in Tunisia protests continue against the inclusion of Mr. Ben Ali's supporters in the interim government, Egyptians will figure out who will lead them. Isn’t that what democracy is all about?
While Egypt’s Western allies may prefer ElBaradei to the Islamists of the Muslim Brotherhood, Egyptians will not accept a Mubarak-lite.
So it’s not any wonder that "Generation Facebook" -- as nimble in the real world as it is in the virtual one -- has leapfrogged over the old men of Egyptian politics and pulled off what no one has been able to in Egypt for decades: street protests that have drawn thousands of Egyptians from every background you can imagine.
Watching their Tunisian counterparts topple their country’s president of 23 years -- Zine El Abidine Ben Ali -- set young Egyptian hearts on fire. Tunisians rose up against Mr. Ben Ali without a leader and that is quickly becoming the cleanest and purest form of civil resistance to dictatorship in the Arab world.
Naysayers are looking for Islamists in the soup, so to speak. But while Islamists have indeed joined the protests in Egypt, they are by no means leading it. And now that opposition figurehead and Nobel Laureate Mohamed ElBaradei has returned to Egypt, young Egyptian protesters both welcomed him home and reminded him who put those people in the streets.
While it might be more palatable for Egypt’s major Western allies like the United States and Europe to see Mr. ElBaradei instead of the Islamists of the Muslim Brotherhood as an alternative to Mr. Mubarak, Egyptians will not accept a Mubarak-lite.
It remains unclear where the armed forces stand on all this. Th protesters know the risks. But knowing the risks and taking them is the point. Just as in Tunisia protests continue against the inclusion of Mr. Ben Ali's supporters in the interim government, Egyptians will figure out who will lead them. Isn’t that what democracy is all about?
Twitterholics Anonymous
By Mona Eltahawy
Jerusalem Report, Jan. 31, 2011
Twitter is my lifeline to the world. Twitter is the bane of my existence. Twitter connects me to everything I care about and Twitter is ruining my life.
Yes, yes, I’m Mona; I’m a Twitterholic, etc. etc.
Here are the places I tweet: In bed (when I wake up in the middle of the night, I’ll reach out for my iPhone and check in on the Twitterverse). In the bathroom (don’t ask). On the street. At bookshops. Standing in line to pay at the grocery store. You get the idea.
Sometimes I’ll even tweet while I’m on the phone with my sister (we follow each other on Twitter) and she’ll tweet back, “I can’t believe you’re tweeting while we’re on the phone!!!”
Yes. It’s bad.
But in all seriousness, before we start to talk about A for Addiction, let me tell you how – for this columnist and news junkie – Twitter has become part of the backbone for my work along with my laptop and Internet connection. It has broken more stories for me than any other news “source” recently.
I spent almost six years as a Reuters correspondent in Cairo and Jerusalem, honing my thirst for speed, which along with accuracy is wire reporting’s forte. Twitter gives you the first and can leave you free-falling when it comes to the second, but if you don’t know how to navigate, then you don’t belong on the Twitterhighway.
I first learned of the bomb attack, which took place a few minutes into the New Year against a Coptic Christian church in Alexandria, Egypt, via Twitter. Granted it was a very slow news day regardless of time zone, but on Twitter there’s always someone awake somewhere.
Twitter wasn’t just the first place I heard about the uprising in Tunisia but it was, for many days, the only place. The US media mostly ignored the worst unrest to hit the North African country in a decade. It started on December 17, when a young man poured gasoline on himself in Sidibouzid to protest police confiscating the fruits and vegetables he sold without a permit, in lieu of a job he couldn’t find despite having a university degree.
This is where who you follow along that Twitterhighway matters. Thanks to a group of activists, journalists and bloggers (sometimes they are all in one), I got not just the latest information from Tunisia – blog entries, video straight from demonstrations, news about arrested bloggers and campaigns for their release – but also live updates from solidarity protests in neighboring countries too, such as the one in Cairo.
And then where else could I follow in real time as Boston-based Mauritanian-American activist Nasser Weddady – who has for years run advocacy campaigns to release activists and journalists imprisoned in the Middle East – demanded that Alec Ross, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s Senior Advisor for Innovation, explain why the U.S. Administration was silent as Tunisia arrested protesters and bloggers and used live ammunition against demonstrators.
Ross is a champion of social media and his boss often extols the virtues of net freedom so it was captivating to follow their discussion because here was Tunisia conducting a vicious war against Facebook users, bloggers, and other online activists to shut them down and yet it got little of the condemnation Washington meted out to Iran when the latter went after online activists after the 2009 elections.
So, of course, I’m on Twitter. I don’t care about Lady GaGa or Justin Bieber who between them have about half of the world following them. Twitter helps me mine the world for small gems of optimism to hold onto – those tireless and increasingly frantic tweets from Cairo protesters corralled by police for more than seven hours, or tweets from Egyptian Muslims who attended Christmas Eve services to show solidarity with their Coptic compatriots and pictures showing them standing outside churches holding candles: I demand to be moved to the edge of tears, rage and optimism and Twitter delivers.
And that’s exactly why it’s destroying my life, my ability to write and my ability to look away from the computer screen. I see a number up there on the Twitter tab and I must refresh, immediately – must.know.now.
I’m glued to Twitter for hours on end. It’s exhausting not just because of the amount of time I spend on it – I don’t just read, I tweet too – but because it keeps you in a constant state of alertness. To write, you need to move beyond that alertness, to stop refreshing that Twitter feed, and to wander away. Twitter never lets me wonder. Its tentacles hold me too tightly.
Just disconnect, you ask? I would lose a vital pipeline of information. But also social interaction.
Writing is a lonely endeavor – the payback for the constant dripdrip-drip of distraction is an army of people across the globe. First up are the Australians, Malaysians and Indonesians. I’ll catch a few hours of them before I head to bed just as the Middle East is waking up. By the time I’m awake – or if I sneak a peak in the middle of sleep – I’ll get Europe and then during my day, it’s the Middle East’s night owls along with North American tweeps.
When I’m up all night to write, I’m never alone. But when I need distance for focus and analysis, again I’m never alone.
Addiction. Connection. Distraction. Twitter I love/hate you.
=============================================
The Two-Way Street of Offense and Bigotry
By Mona Eltahawy, IslamComment, Sept. 13, 2010
I’m a big fan of offense. It was offense that drew me to Park51, the proposed Islamic community centre and mosque in Lower Manhattan, two blocks from Ground Zero. But not for the reasons you think.For once, Muslims are not the ones offended but the ones being accused of offense by choosing to build Park51 “on hallowed ground.” I don’t believe Park51’s backers mean to offend but let’s set aside intent and talk about freedom to offend.
When Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten published cartoons of Prophet Mohammed in 2005 that led to huge and at times deadly demonstrations across several Muslim-majority countries in 2006, I defended the newspaper’s right to offend. I found the violent reactions to the cartoons more offensive to the memory of the prophet than any of the images.
The freedom guaranteeing publication of those cartoons is the same as that which guarantees Park51’s right to build right there, two blocks from Ground Zero, and the same as that which guarantees the right of a Gainesville, FL, pastor and his congregation to threaten to burn copies of the Qur’an on the anniversary of 9/11.
Note I’m coming at this from the opposite direction of Park51 opponents such as Sarah Palin and John Boehner (Rep-OH) who equate burning the Quran with the proposal to build Park51, issue calls on Pastor Terry Jones not to burn the Quran and then think they can tell Park51 not to build. That’s the wrong kind of tit-for-tat!
My kind of tit-for-tat says the U.S. constitution guarantees freedom of religion and freedom of expression, whether they offend people or not. Hurt feelings cannot be the basis of public policy. And that’s why I’m not calling on Jones to abandon threats to burn the Quran. I have plans of my own that day.
And incidentally, since we’re talking about offense – I find it much more offensive that right-wing blogger Pamela Geller of the “Stop Islamization of America” – which has spearheaded opposition to Park51 – are politically exploiting the anniversary of 9/11. While they claim to speak out on behalf of the grieving families they trample all over their grief and use the anniversary for their own political ends.
The pain of losing someone in the 9/11 attacks is unfathomable. But to ask “Don’t you see you’re being offensive by building here”, is to assume that all Muslims are responsible for the attacks. It’s a slippery slope to even begin that conversation because if Park51 is forced to move it would set a dangerous precedent.
It was one that Bill Kuntz, who’s running for Congress in Miami as an Independent, wanted to set at an anti-Park51 protest where people held U.S. and Israeli flags – I wondered at the outrage had we Park51 supporters held flags of another country.Kuntz’ opposition to Park51, it turns out, isn’t just about sensitivity to 9/11 victims and their families. He’s opposed to mosques everywhere. He said he opposed plans to build a mosque in a neighborhood in his constituency because the mosque would offend the sensibilities of the neighborhood.
I didn’t care much about Park51 at first. I live in Harlem and didn’t imagine I’d regularly commute downtown to TriBeCa when the centre was built. But I began to care when it became one of many mosque projects across the U.S. facing opposition and anti-Muslim rhetoric. And so for Labor Day weekend I joined a motley crew of volunteers outside Park51 to peacefully support its right to build.
For me, the wave of anti-Muslim rhetoric arcs as I celebrate my 10th anniversary in the U.S. I identify as an American and I’m a proud New Yorker. The hate has strengthened my resolve to get out there and tell my fellow Americans: I’m here, I will not be brushed away, let’s talk.
I am eternally grateful to Matt Sky, 26, a web consultant for giving me that chance to talk when he first started standing outside Park51 on Aug. 15, thereby inspiring a small but dedicated group of volunteer sidewalk activists. Many of them are not Muslim but I joined them as an American Muslim saddened to hear that only 37 percent of Americans know a Muslim.
Some come to Park51 to talk with the sidewalk activists. A 9/11 first responder who lost two friends told me he thought Park51 should move out of respect. A physician who tended to the 9/11 wounded said she couldn’t wait for the community centre to open so that her daughter could use its pool but she worried Park51 would become a target of violence.
Some came to offend. Internet televangelist Bill Keller arrived with an entourage and an American flag wrapped around his neck. (Isn’t that a desecration of the flag?)
“I feel passionately that 1.5 billion people will burn in hell because they believe in the lie of Islam,” he told the cameras, hamming it up with concerns he claimed he had for Muslim women’s rights. Ironically as he spoke, six American Muslim women stood behind him holding signs reading “Peace Tolerance Love” and not one of us looked the least bit like chattel.
A husband and wife team dumped on the sidewalk shoes made out of foam with insults written on the soles such as “Are you stoned?”, “Sticking Our Tongues Out At Sharia Law” and “Sharia Hamas Organization Extremist”. As the husband taunted us, the wife filmed our reactions.
Someone left a bag of dog feces on Park51’s stoop one night. Opponents circled Park51 with a decommissioned missile attached to the back of their car.
This year’s 9/11 anniversary coincides with the end of the Muslim fasting month of Ramadan. This Muslim will spend her Eid teaching in Oklahoma. While Terry Jones leads his congregation in burning Qurans in Gainesville, I will teach my students to revere books. Thank God for the Constitution.
During his first U.S. media appearance since Park51 became the “Ground Zero Mosque” unleashing all kinds of hell, Imam Feisal Abdel Rauf, a spiritual backer of the center, told CNN that Park51 must continue or else headlines in the Muslim world would portray Islam as under attack in the U.S. and it would give radicals in the Muslim world reason to threaten U.S. national security.
Quite frankly, that is nonsense. Park51 should continue because it’s more an issue for American Muslims – over here, in the U.S. – than it is about the Muslim world, radicals or not. Yes, the ability of the U.S. to lecture anyone on religious freedom would be seriously compromised but for an imam to play the card of the “radicals in the Muslim world who would threaten our national security” is dancing on the stereotype of Muslims as crazies who need little reason to go berserk.
That was essentially the reason which a number of U.S. officials from the president himself to General Petraeus in Afghanistan used as they lined up to plead with Pastor Jones in Gainesville to cancel his threat to burn the Quran. Instead of emphasizing that burning books would put him on the same ignoble path as Nazis and the mobs which burned Salman Rushdie’s “Satanic Verses”, the message was “Don’t drive the crazy Muslims even crazier!”
Opponents of Park51 have also began using a dodgy logic of their own to oppose it. In the words of one woman I encountered on Twitter: “How many churches are there in your country?” She didn’t consider for a second of course that “my country” could be the U.S. and even, as the case is, if I was born in another country (Egypt), she was assuming that all Muslim-majority countries are like Saudi Arabia, the only country in the Persian Gulf that bars the building of houses of worship for non-Muslims.
It became the shameful exception in 2008 after the first Catholic church — bearing no cross, no bells and no steeple — opened in Qatar. In Saudi Arabia, it is difficult even for Muslims who don’t adhere to the ultra-orthodox Wahhabi sect; Shiites, for example, routinely face discrimination.
So I had the pleasure to enlighten my interlocutor on Twitter to the fact that “my country” has some of the oldest churches in the world. The idea that there were Christians “over there” had, I’m sure never occurred to her; just as the idea that there were Muslims “over here” – i.e. me tweeting from NYC.
While I hesitate to call everyone who opposes Park51 a bigot, a recent Washington Poll post has shown that most opponents to the center hold the most negative views of Islam.But we must not lose sight of the need to fight their bigotry as well as that of the people “over there”. I further told my Twitter interlocutor that it saddened me deeply that Christians and other minorities in my country of birth faced bigotry and that it was imperative to fight bigotry “over here”, “over there” and everywhere.
The Muslim world has little to stand on if it tries to complain about how the United States treats its Muslim citizens – that’s why it should stay out of this argument and leave it to American Muslims to have, based on our constitutional guarantees and not based on any false claims to a moral high ground.
While Egypt does indeed have some of the oldest churches in the world, unfortunately my Christian brothers and sisters face bigotry and immense difficulty in building churches. They must obtain a security permit just for renovations.
Bigotry must be condemned wherever it occurs. If majority-Muslim countries want to criticize the mistreatment of Muslims living as minority communities elsewhere, they should be prepared to withstand the same level of scrutiny regarding their own mistreatment of minorities.
And to anyone else who wants to know how many churches there are in “my country”, I ask simply: do you really want to compare the U.S. to a dictatorship (albeit one of America’s best friends in the Middle East)?
Offense and bigotry are two way streets. Let’s remember to look in both directions.
Saturday, December 11th, 2010
By Mona Eltahawy
Dec. 10, 2010
I’m a Muslim. I’m a feminist. And I’m here to confuse you,” I told attendees at the TEDWomen conference, where I was a speaker, in Washington this week.
The conversation on Muslim women usually revolves around our head scarves and our hymens — what’s on our heads (or not), what’s between our legs, and the price we pay for it.
For kick-ass feminist icons, I have a long history to choose from.
In the 7th century, there’s Khadijah, Prophet Muhammad’s first wife. She was a rich divorcee who owned her own business, who was his boss, who was 15 years older than him and who proposed to him.
My fondness for younger men clearly has a precedent.
But the first wave of feminism for many Muslim women started at a Cairo train station in 1923 where Hoda Shaarawi removed her face veil, which, long before anyone was burning their bras, she described as a thing of the past. She must be turning in her grave as some today try to justify covering women’s faces.
My paternal grandmother was a teacher, a furious smoker, a fast walker and an adamant supporter of a soccer club hated by most of her children
My maternal grandmother — whose sexually racy jokes would outrage her children — was pregnant 14 times. Eleven of those children survived.
My mother — the eldest of those children and the first woman in her family to get a PhD — has three children.
I am the eldest of the three and I’ve chosen not to have any children. My mother had her youngest when she was 42. My sister is now herself working on a PhD and is longing for a baby.
I was born in Egypt, where I belonged to the Sunni Muslim majority. When I was 7, we moved to London, where I learned to become a minority and learned too how little was expected of Muslim women, Teachers assumed my dad’s work brought us to London and were shocked to hear Muslim wives didn’t take the husband’s name.
We moved to Saudi Arabia when I was 15 and I fell into a deep depression as I struggled to find a place among very different Islams.
At home, I was taught an Islam by parents who were equals and who were raising my brother and me to be equals. Outside our new home was an Islam that treated women like the walking embodiment of sin. I was done with Muslim men.
I chose to wear a head scarf and became a feminist (the two weren’t mutually exclusive) after I discovered essays by Muslim women scholars who taught me women could reinterpret religion. They terrified the hell out of me.
When I returned to Egypt at 21, I learned Muslim men were not the enemy after all, as progressive, liberal Muslim women and men helped me define my own place in Islam.
My headscarves-and-hymens moment came when I took off my head scarf — it no longer represented the Muslim woman I was becoming — and I became increasingly obsessed with female genital mutilation after I learned how many members of my extended family had been subjected to it.
Both Muslims and Christians practise genital cutting in Egypt. It’s not about religion. It’s about hymens — and that’s about controlling women’s sexuality.
I moved to Israel, where I was the first Egyptian to live and work there for a western news agency. I became a liberal Muslim because my ultra-Orthodox Jewish neighbours reminded me of ultra-orthodox Muslim Saudis. Orthodoxy serves men much more than it does women.
I moved to the U.S. 10 years ago after marrying an American, but when we divorced two years later I got into my car and spent 18 days driving alone to New York City. It was my American pilgrimage. My reward was a community of like-minded Muslims together with whom I prayed behind Amina Wadud, an American Muslim scholar, in the first public female-led mixed-gender Friday prayer. Without a head scarf and on my period, I prayed next to a man — sacrilege to many but a delight to me.
I belong to Musawah — the global movement for equality and justice in the Muslim family. A young British Muslim woman told me at the launch in Malaysia last year that if she had to choose between Islam and feminism, Islam would win. A young Egyptian Muslim woman told me if she had to choose between Islam and feminism, feminism would win.
For my sister-in-law, it is about head scarves and hymens. She wears a head scarf and she’s a gynecologist. For the past five years she was the only woman ob/gyn doctor in a tiny Ohio town.
She was the true “jihadi” — every time her patients heard Fox News talk about Moozlums and “them Ayrabs” she was there as the antidote.
This summer I confused people outside the Islamic Community Centre near Ground Zero known as Park51. When a bigoted couple came to insult and provoke us, I gave them the middle finger. I mustered patience with others. But when Bill Keller, a right-wing televangelist came to shed crocodile tears over Muslim women it was clear he was boosting his ego, not my rights.
I’m no fool. I know that terrible violations of women’s rights are committed in the name of my faith. But Islam belongs to me too.
I’m in a boxing ring. On one side is Bill Keller’s right wing: bigoted and xenophobic. On the other side is the Muslim right wing, which uses Islam against me to fuel its misogyny.
I’m a bumble bee who carries ideas — pollen — from one place to another in the hope that they will blossom into a wild and challenging orchard. The pollen might be sweet, but I “sting like a bee” because like the great Muhammad Ali, I will not hesitate to knock you out.
Confusion is both my right and left hook.
-------------------------------------------------
By Mona Eltahawy
Jerusalem Report
Jan. 3, 2011
How do you discuss virginity with a class of American university students without the conversation sounding irrelevant to their lives or, worse, an exercise in exoticizing another culture?
Women, sex and culture can be a Bermuda Triangle that threatens to demolish discussion through either defensiveness – when students feel compelled to defend a cultural practice – or superiority – when students feel compelled to parade their culture as being above whatever cultural challenges are being discussed.
The personal is not only political but it demolishes that Bermuda Triangle. I got a powerful reminder about that in September when I taught a course on gender and new media in the Middle East, in Oklahoma. We had watched the Lebanese film “Caramel,” directed by and starring Nadine Labaki, as the owner of a Beirut hair salon whose friends and coworkers portray a cross-section of Lebanese female experience.
One friend undergoes hymen reconstruction just before her wedding to a man she fears will reject her if he finds out she isn’t a virgin. Students didn’t miss a beat.
“Have you heard of purity balls?” asked one young woman, referring to formal dances in the US between fathers and daughters at which teenage girls pledge to remain virgins until marriage.
Yes, I thought! It was an especially sharp class. Most of them were majoring in Women’s and Gender Studies. They were comfortable with the personal and with making those connections.I had indeed heard of purity balls through news articles, but they seemed to be as foreign to me and to the class as hymen reconstruction.
Until the personal shook us out of our complacency. “I just want everyone to know that I signed a purity pledge with my father,” one of the students said.
I could not have engineered it better myself. Her courage in sharing reminded us all that virginity wasn’t just over there in Lebanon. It was right in class with us. Oklahoma kept doing that to me. I joke that going there was like going to the Middle East: a similar mix of religion and conservative politics. (Oklahoma is the only state in which every county was red after the 2008 presidential election.)
Some of the other students tip-toed toward questions for the student who had shared her purity pledge experience. We were all adjusting.
“I respect that you think you’ve made a free choice,” one student told her. “But [US playwright] Eve Ensler said that when you sign a pledge to your father, your sexuality is being taken away from you until you sign it to your husband when you get married.”
Teaching is like alchemy. You take a few students, mix them with some difficult subjects and you are bound to be stunned by the results.
I make my classes as personal as possible. I offer my experiences to keep a face on the issue we’re talking about, and so the least I could do to appreciate the generous sharing we had all witnessed – and to express solidarity with a conservative position I once shared – was to tell the class how long I had waited to have sex. There were no purity pledges in my past. But there was a time when I, too, believed I should wait till I got married before I had sex – but then it took forever to get married and I got fed up waiting.
When I was younger, I had no one to share that with. The guilt was exacerbated by secrecy and for a long time I could talk about sex only with non-Muslim women friends.
But I’ve become bolder. It’s not always reciprocated or appreciated. At one Muslim women’s conference, after I shared how difficult it had been to overcome the guilt of premarital sex, another Muslim woman bluntly told me that the Koran clearly stated that “fornicators were for fornicators,” so there was a “fornicator” out there for me somewhere.
Charming.
Undeterred, sometimes driven by an insatiable need to share – share and shed the guilt – my skin has thickened. It was made more resilient in Oklahoma – so familiar that some evenings, alone in my hotel room, weeping was the only way to let go of memories, some as far back as 20 years, but still close to the bone.
Oklahoma prepared me well for Amsterdam. Differences in moral ethos aside, my reward for all that sharing with my students was a group of Dutch Muslim women of Moroccan descent with whom I could talk honestly about sex – safely and without any self-righteous references to
“fornicators.”
“When I first had sex, it was as if my mother, my father, my grandparents, the entire neighborhood, God and all the angels were there watching,” one of them said. The rest of us convulsed with laughter and all too familiar memories.
Male-dominated religions and cultures that cater to male sexuality, with barely a nod to women’s desires, are difficult enough without the judgments of fellow women. I know where it comes from; I recognize its need to conform. And like our virginity discussion, the best way to defang the self-righteousness is with the personal.
Women’s stories are too often dismissed. A male editor I once worked with tried to dissuade me from the personal: “Who cares about what happened to you?”
The most subversive thing a woman can do is talk about her life as if it really mattered.
It does.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Dec. 10, 2010
I’m a Muslim. I’m a feminist. And I’m here to confuse you,” I told attendees at the TEDWomen conference, where I was a speaker, in Washington this week.
The conversation on Muslim women usually revolves around our head scarves and our hymens — what’s on our heads (or not), what’s between our legs, and the price we pay for it.
For kick-ass feminist icons, I have a long history to choose from.
In the 7th century, there’s Khadijah, Prophet Muhammad’s first wife. She was a rich divorcee who owned her own business, who was his boss, who was 15 years older than him and who proposed to him.
My fondness for younger men clearly has a precedent.
But the first wave of feminism for many Muslim women started at a Cairo train station in 1923 where Hoda Shaarawi removed her face veil, which, long before anyone was burning their bras, she described as a thing of the past. She must be turning in her grave as some today try to justify covering women’s faces.
My paternal grandmother was a teacher, a furious smoker, a fast walker and an adamant supporter of a soccer club hated by most of her children
My maternal grandmother — whose sexually racy jokes would outrage her children — was pregnant 14 times. Eleven of those children survived.
My mother — the eldest of those children and the first woman in her family to get a PhD — has three children.
I am the eldest of the three and I’ve chosen not to have any children. My mother had her youngest when she was 42. My sister is now herself working on a PhD and is longing for a baby.
I was born in Egypt, where I belonged to the Sunni Muslim majority. When I was 7, we moved to London, where I learned to become a minority and learned too how little was expected of Muslim women, Teachers assumed my dad’s work brought us to London and were shocked to hear Muslim wives didn’t take the husband’s name.
We moved to Saudi Arabia when I was 15 and I fell into a deep depression as I struggled to find a place among very different Islams.
At home, I was taught an Islam by parents who were equals and who were raising my brother and me to be equals. Outside our new home was an Islam that treated women like the walking embodiment of sin. I was done with Muslim men.
I chose to wear a head scarf and became a feminist (the two weren’t mutually exclusive) after I discovered essays by Muslim women scholars who taught me women could reinterpret religion. They terrified the hell out of me.
When I returned to Egypt at 21, I learned Muslim men were not the enemy after all, as progressive, liberal Muslim women and men helped me define my own place in Islam.
My headscarves-and-hymens moment came when I took off my head scarf — it no longer represented the Muslim woman I was becoming — and I became increasingly obsessed with female genital mutilation after I learned how many members of my extended family had been subjected to it.
Both Muslims and Christians practise genital cutting in Egypt. It’s not about religion. It’s about hymens — and that’s about controlling women’s sexuality.
I moved to Israel, where I was the first Egyptian to live and work there for a western news agency. I became a liberal Muslim because my ultra-Orthodox Jewish neighbours reminded me of ultra-orthodox Muslim Saudis. Orthodoxy serves men much more than it does women.
I moved to the U.S. 10 years ago after marrying an American, but when we divorced two years later I got into my car and spent 18 days driving alone to New York City. It was my American pilgrimage. My reward was a community of like-minded Muslims together with whom I prayed behind Amina Wadud, an American Muslim scholar, in the first public female-led mixed-gender Friday prayer. Without a head scarf and on my period, I prayed next to a man — sacrilege to many but a delight to me.
I belong to Musawah — the global movement for equality and justice in the Muslim family. A young British Muslim woman told me at the launch in Malaysia last year that if she had to choose between Islam and feminism, Islam would win. A young Egyptian Muslim woman told me if she had to choose between Islam and feminism, feminism would win.
For my sister-in-law, it is about head scarves and hymens. She wears a head scarf and she’s a gynecologist. For the past five years she was the only woman ob/gyn doctor in a tiny Ohio town.
She was the true “jihadi” — every time her patients heard Fox News talk about Moozlums and “them Ayrabs” she was there as the antidote.
This summer I confused people outside the Islamic Community Centre near Ground Zero known as Park51. When a bigoted couple came to insult and provoke us, I gave them the middle finger. I mustered patience with others. But when Bill Keller, a right-wing televangelist came to shed crocodile tears over Muslim women it was clear he was boosting his ego, not my rights.
I’m no fool. I know that terrible violations of women’s rights are committed in the name of my faith. But Islam belongs to me too.
I’m in a boxing ring. On one side is Bill Keller’s right wing: bigoted and xenophobic. On the other side is the Muslim right wing, which uses Islam against me to fuel its misogyny.
I’m a bumble bee who carries ideas — pollen — from one place to another in the hope that they will blossom into a wild and challenging orchard. The pollen might be sweet, but I “sting like a bee” because like the great Muhammad Ali, I will not hesitate to knock you out.
Confusion is both my right and left hook.
The Me Monologues
by Mona Eltahawy on Wednesday, December 15, 2010 at 6:27pm
By Mona Eltahawy
Jerusalem Report
Jan. 3, 2011
How do you discuss virginity with a class of American university students without the conversation sounding irrelevant to their lives or, worse, an exercise in exoticizing another culture?
Women, sex and culture can be a Bermuda Triangle that threatens to demolish discussion through either defensiveness – when students feel compelled to defend a cultural practice – or superiority – when students feel compelled to parade their culture as being above whatever cultural challenges are being discussed.
The personal is not only political but it demolishes that Bermuda Triangle. I got a powerful reminder about that in September when I taught a course on gender and new media in the Middle East, in Oklahoma. We had watched the Lebanese film “Caramel,” directed by and starring Nadine Labaki, as the owner of a Beirut hair salon whose friends and coworkers portray a cross-section of Lebanese female experience.
One friend undergoes hymen reconstruction just before her wedding to a man she fears will reject her if he finds out she isn’t a virgin. Students didn’t miss a beat.
“Have you heard of purity balls?” asked one young woman, referring to formal dances in the US between fathers and daughters at which teenage girls pledge to remain virgins until marriage.
Yes, I thought! It was an especially sharp class. Most of them were majoring in Women’s and Gender Studies. They were comfortable with the personal and with making those connections.I had indeed heard of purity balls through news articles, but they seemed to be as foreign to me and to the class as hymen reconstruction.
Until the personal shook us out of our complacency. “I just want everyone to know that I signed a purity pledge with my father,” one of the students said.
I could not have engineered it better myself. Her courage in sharing reminded us all that virginity wasn’t just over there in Lebanon. It was right in class with us. Oklahoma kept doing that to me. I joke that going there was like going to the Middle East: a similar mix of religion and conservative politics. (Oklahoma is the only state in which every county was red after the 2008 presidential election.)
Some of the other students tip-toed toward questions for the student who had shared her purity pledge experience. We were all adjusting.
“I respect that you think you’ve made a free choice,” one student told her. “But [US playwright] Eve Ensler said that when you sign a pledge to your father, your sexuality is being taken away from you until you sign it to your husband when you get married.”
Teaching is like alchemy. You take a few students, mix them with some difficult subjects and you are bound to be stunned by the results.
I make my classes as personal as possible. I offer my experiences to keep a face on the issue we’re talking about, and so the least I could do to appreciate the generous sharing we had all witnessed – and to express solidarity with a conservative position I once shared – was to tell the class how long I had waited to have sex. There were no purity pledges in my past. But there was a time when I, too, believed I should wait till I got married before I had sex – but then it took forever to get married and I got fed up waiting.
When I was younger, I had no one to share that with. The guilt was exacerbated by secrecy and for a long time I could talk about sex only with non-Muslim women friends.
But I’ve become bolder. It’s not always reciprocated or appreciated. At one Muslim women’s conference, after I shared how difficult it had been to overcome the guilt of premarital sex, another Muslim woman bluntly told me that the Koran clearly stated that “fornicators were for fornicators,” so there was a “fornicator” out there for me somewhere.
Charming.
Undeterred, sometimes driven by an insatiable need to share – share and shed the guilt – my skin has thickened. It was made more resilient in Oklahoma – so familiar that some evenings, alone in my hotel room, weeping was the only way to let go of memories, some as far back as 20 years, but still close to the bone.
Oklahoma prepared me well for Amsterdam. Differences in moral ethos aside, my reward for all that sharing with my students was a group of Dutch Muslim women of Moroccan descent with whom I could talk honestly about sex – safely and without any self-righteous references to
“fornicators.”
“When I first had sex, it was as if my mother, my father, my grandparents, the entire neighborhood, God and all the angels were there watching,” one of them said. The rest of us convulsed with laughter and all too familiar memories.
Male-dominated religions and cultures that cater to male sexuality, with barely a nod to women’s desires, are difficult enough without the judgments of fellow women. I know where it comes from; I recognize its need to conform. And like our virginity discussion, the best way to defang the self-righteousness is with the personal.
Women’s stories are too often dismissed. A male editor I once worked with tried to dissuade me from the personal: “Who cares about what happened to you?”
The most subversive thing a woman can do is talk about her life as if it really mattered.
It does.
Mona took part in Noisy Discussion on "When is Rape - Rape" on BBC World Service NewsHour 17th Nov 2010.
Taboo and Rape in Egypt
By Mona Eltahawy
The Jerusalem Report
Oct. 28, 2010
A WOMAN, COVERED head-to-toe in a black veil, appeared on Egyptian television this summer to drop a bombshell: two policemen, she said, had raped her.
It’s unclear if she normally wears the niqab, the face veil, or if it served to protect her anonymity. But there was no doubt that her allegation served as a sledgehammer to strike two of Egypt’s sorest spots of late: sexual assault and police brutality.
The latter has been the subject of outcry and unprecedented protest since Khaled Said, a young businessman, died on June 6 from what his family and witnesses say was a police beating. Two plainclothes police officers went on trial on July 27, charged with illegal arrest and excessive force.
Standing up to the police in a country that’s been under emergency law for 29 years comes with considerable risk. Said’s family says he was targeted after posting an online video allegedly showing police sharing the profit of a drug bust.
Reporting rape anywhere is difficult but in Egypt’s conservative culture, women keep quiet rather than risk arousing blame or humiliation, and at times rape again at a police station. In some cases, they risk being killed by a relative to rid the family of shame.
“I am sacrificing my reputation by telling the story... to protect every girl, every woman who may trust a police van. I tell them now, if you see a police van, you must be very careful,” she said. “I want the officials to know what policemen do to the people. Even now, I still can’t believe or comprehend that these were policemen.”
Her lawyer told the TV station a police investigation had recognized that the rape took place but didn’t identify the attackers as policemen. It’s unclear how her case has proceeded. Assailants in rape cases face sentences ranging from three years to life imprisonment. Marital rape is not illegal in Egypt.
Some 20,000 rapes are reported in Egypt each year, according to a state-run research center. But that figure is said to represent just 10 percent of the total number of victims. When I was a reporter in Cairo, psychiatrists were my source for information on sexual assaults. They are the ones rape survivors went to for help to cope.
Sexual assaults have been surfacing for a while, often with a background of police ineptitude or compliance. In 2005, hundreds of Egyptians staged an angry protest against the sexual harassment and assault of female activists and reporters by suspected government supporters. The women said police and security forces stood by, some shouting orders during the assaults.
Sexual assaults in downtown Cairo during a religious festival in 2006 forced Egypt to confront the consequences of its unchecked sexual harassment. Women said police did nothing as men tore off their clothes and headscarves, groping them and in some cases trying to rape them during the festival. The Interior Ministry denied the assaults even took place.
Bloggers at the scene posted photographs and videos of the assaults, pushing them onto the headlines and forcing a long-overdue reckoning. A number of draft laws dealing with sexual harassment are under consideration by Parliament but there is still nothing on Egypt’s statute books that specifically prohibits street harassment.
Later this year, a volunteer-run private venture, HarassMap, will be launched that will allow women to report street sexual harassment by sending an SMS to a centralized computer. They will receive a reply offering support and practical advice, and the reports will be used to build up a detailed and publicly available map of harassment hot spots that activists hope will shame authorities into taking greater action.
Attitudes toward rape across the Arab world generally are abysmal. The stigma – and often the law – is much harsher on the woman than on the rapist.
Two cases notorious for their miscarriage of justice clearly illustrate why most women who are raped keep quiet. In 2007, a Saudi woman who reported being gang-raped was sentenced to 200 lashes and imprisonment for being alone with a man. After an international outcry, the Saudi king pardoned her.
In June, a court in Abu Dhabi sentenced an 18-year-old Emirati woman to a year in prison for illicit sex after she reported that six men had gang-raped her. The court said that by agreeing to go for a drive with a male friend, a 19-year-old military police officer, she had consented to having sex with him.
The woman in niqab on Egyptian television understood the magnitude of what she was doing. Her tearful TV segment, which has gone viral on YouTube, stands to become as iconic as the harrowing footage in 2006 of policemen sodomizing bus driver Emad Kabir with a stick. Two bloggers posted that footage and two of the policemen were sentenced to three years in jail. Kabir’s testimony helped break the taboo around male rape in police custody.
The woman in niqab is helping break a taboo too, but neither she nor Egypt is ready for her to do so as publicly as Kabir, whose name we know and whose face was clearly visible as he screamed in pain in the footage of his rape.
All we know of the woman in niqab is that she is a grandmother.
She told that to the police she accuses of raping her as she pleaded with them to stop.
And Saudi in next article:
By Mona Eltahawy
Toronto Star
Nov. 14, 2010
NEW YORK—It took years to make the United Nations' newest agency, UN Women, a reality, and then just one day to effectively kill it.
Death was effected by allowing onto its board a kingdom where women are not just infamously prohibited from driving but are also virtual minors who need a male guardian's permission to travel and to have surgery — and must be covered from head to toe in public.
As one of two countries guaranteed seats as emerging donor nations, Saudi Arabia essentially bought its way onto the board of UN Women, which is dedicated to gender equality around the world.
Just three days after securing an automatic seat, Saudi Arabia gave us a reminder of just how oxymoronic its place on UN Women is, when its team showed up at the Asian Games in China without a single woman among the 180-strong delegation.
Iran, another country with a dismal women's rights record, lost its bid for election to the board of UN Women after furious back-channel diplomacy by the United States and its allies. Still, at the games, which started in China on Saturday, Iran will field 92 female athletes in its 395-strong delegation.
Welcome to the ugly world of wrangling over women's rights records depending on whether “we” like you or not.
Don't misunderstand — Iran deserves to be kept out of UN Women. Iranian Nobel laureate Shirin Ebadi had warned just before the vote that it was a “joke” that her country was in line to get a place on the board. But she said the same of Saudi Arabia, rightly pointing out that its women's rights record was worse than Iran's.
It's not as if the UN was unaware of that abysmal record. After all, who could forget the farce that ensued when a Saudi delegation appeared for the first time before the UN women's rights panel in Geneva in 2008 and absurdly insisted that women in their country faced no discrimination?
But the most ludicrous claim came when the UN committee asked why Saudi men could marry up to four wives. With a straight face, a Saudi delegate — a man, of course — explained that it was to ensure a man's sexual appetite was satisfied legally if one wife could not fulfill it.
Not surprisingly, then-UN special rapporteur on violence against women, Yakin Erturk, soon went to Saudi Arabia on a 10-day fact-finding mission.
So where was the outrage on voting day, Nov. 10, as Saudi Arabia's “generous contribution” landed it on UN Women's board?
Distracted, at best.
U.S., European Union, Australian and Canadian diplomats had been working hard to kick Iran off the list of 10 countries from the Asian region up for election to the board. Iran — which for weeks has been threatening to stone a woman for alleged adultery — does not belong on the board.
But it was disgusting to hear American ambassador to the UN Susan E. Rice celebrate Iran's defeat and yet, when pushed on Saudi Arabia, say only that she would “not deny that there were several countries that are going to join the board of UN women that have less than stellar records on women's rights, indeed human rights.”
Once again, women are the cheapest bargaining chips, thrown on the table to silence and appease allies and “major donors.”
Why are countries such as Saudi Arabia eager to join international bodies like UN Women? Because it translates into clout — membership in a powerful new agency — with very few obligations.
In 2000, Saudi Arabia ratified an international bill of rights for women but stipulated that the country's interpretation of Islamic law (Sharia) would prevail if there were conflicts with the bill's provisions. So why sign in the first place? Especially as that interpretation is where so much discrimination against women originates — polygamy, half inheritance allotted to a man, little access to divorce and child marriage among them.
Other countries also hide behind those reservations, which begs the question of why they're allowed to sign conventions they effectively neuter.
It's worth noting here that the U.S. hasn't ratified the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women, so it doesn't stand on the firmest of ground when it wants to lecture others.
And a day after the U. N. Women fiasco, the U.S. joined China, Iran, Sudan, Saudi Arabia and others in opposing the call of a UN General Assembly human rights committee for a moratorium on the death penalty.
Human rights groups have vowed extra scrutiny for Saudi Arabia, and some Saudi women have said it could help them to have that additional spotlight on the kingdom. But as long as Saudi Arabia has that way out — the religion card — it makes a mockery of the system.
Saudi activists courageously fight against a compendium of horrors that girls and women face, but international acquiescence to oil — the kingdom sits on the world's largest reserves — and the fact that Saudi Arabia is home to Islam's two holiest sites too often guarantee it a free pass.
If UN Women is to have any bite, it should focus on justice for Saudi women and not on their country's “generous contributions.”
The Jerusalem Report
Oct. 28, 2010
A WOMAN, COVERED head-to-toe in a black veil, appeared on Egyptian television this summer to drop a bombshell: two policemen, she said, had raped her.
It’s unclear if she normally wears the niqab, the face veil, or if it served to protect her anonymity. But there was no doubt that her allegation served as a sledgehammer to strike two of Egypt’s sorest spots of late: sexual assault and police brutality.
The latter has been the subject of outcry and unprecedented protest since Khaled Said, a young businessman, died on June 6 from what his family and witnesses say was a police beating. Two plainclothes police officers went on trial on July 27, charged with illegal arrest and excessive force.
Standing up to the police in a country that’s been under emergency law for 29 years comes with considerable risk. Said’s family says he was targeted after posting an online video allegedly showing police sharing the profit of a drug bust.
Reporting rape anywhere is difficult but in Egypt’s conservative culture, women keep quiet rather than risk arousing blame or humiliation, and at times rape again at a police station. In some cases, they risk being killed by a relative to rid the family of shame.
“I am sacrificing my reputation by telling the story... to protect every girl, every woman who may trust a police van. I tell them now, if you see a police van, you must be very careful,” she said. “I want the officials to know what policemen do to the people. Even now, I still can’t believe or comprehend that these were policemen.”
Her lawyer told the TV station a police investigation had recognized that the rape took place but didn’t identify the attackers as policemen. It’s unclear how her case has proceeded. Assailants in rape cases face sentences ranging from three years to life imprisonment. Marital rape is not illegal in Egypt.
Some 20,000 rapes are reported in Egypt each year, according to a state-run research center. But that figure is said to represent just 10 percent of the total number of victims. When I was a reporter in Cairo, psychiatrists were my source for information on sexual assaults. They are the ones rape survivors went to for help to cope.
Sexual assaults have been surfacing for a while, often with a background of police ineptitude or compliance. In 2005, hundreds of Egyptians staged an angry protest against the sexual harassment and assault of female activists and reporters by suspected government supporters. The women said police and security forces stood by, some shouting orders during the assaults.
Sexual assaults in downtown Cairo during a religious festival in 2006 forced Egypt to confront the consequences of its unchecked sexual harassment. Women said police did nothing as men tore off their clothes and headscarves, groping them and in some cases trying to rape them during the festival. The Interior Ministry denied the assaults even took place.
Bloggers at the scene posted photographs and videos of the assaults, pushing them onto the headlines and forcing a long-overdue reckoning. A number of draft laws dealing with sexual harassment are under consideration by Parliament but there is still nothing on Egypt’s statute books that specifically prohibits street harassment.
Later this year, a volunteer-run private venture, HarassMap, will be launched that will allow women to report street sexual harassment by sending an SMS to a centralized computer. They will receive a reply offering support and practical advice, and the reports will be used to build up a detailed and publicly available map of harassment hot spots that activists hope will shame authorities into taking greater action.
Attitudes toward rape across the Arab world generally are abysmal. The stigma – and often the law – is much harsher on the woman than on the rapist.
Two cases notorious for their miscarriage of justice clearly illustrate why most women who are raped keep quiet. In 2007, a Saudi woman who reported being gang-raped was sentenced to 200 lashes and imprisonment for being alone with a man. After an international outcry, the Saudi king pardoned her.
In June, a court in Abu Dhabi sentenced an 18-year-old Emirati woman to a year in prison for illicit sex after she reported that six men had gang-raped her. The court said that by agreeing to go for a drive with a male friend, a 19-year-old military police officer, she had consented to having sex with him.
The woman in niqab on Egyptian television understood the magnitude of what she was doing. Her tearful TV segment, which has gone viral on YouTube, stands to become as iconic as the harrowing footage in 2006 of policemen sodomizing bus driver Emad Kabir with a stick. Two bloggers posted that footage and two of the policemen were sentenced to three years in jail. Kabir’s testimony helped break the taboo around male rape in police custody.
The woman in niqab is helping break a taboo too, but neither she nor Egypt is ready for her to do so as publicly as Kabir, whose name we know and whose face was clearly visible as he screamed in pain in the footage of his rape.
All we know of the woman in niqab is that she is a grandmother.
She told that to the police she accuses of raping her as she pleaded with them to stop.
And Saudi in next article:
Saudi Arabia's Spot on UN Women is a Sad Joke
by Mona Eltahawy on Sunday, November 14, 2010 at 4:49am
Toronto Star
Nov. 14, 2010
NEW YORK—It took years to make the United Nations' newest agency, UN Women, a reality, and then just one day to effectively kill it.
Death was effected by allowing onto its board a kingdom where women are not just infamously prohibited from driving but are also virtual minors who need a male guardian's permission to travel and to have surgery — and must be covered from head to toe in public.
As one of two countries guaranteed seats as emerging donor nations, Saudi Arabia essentially bought its way onto the board of UN Women, which is dedicated to gender equality around the world.
Just three days after securing an automatic seat, Saudi Arabia gave us a reminder of just how oxymoronic its place on UN Women is, when its team showed up at the Asian Games in China without a single woman among the 180-strong delegation.
Iran, another country with a dismal women's rights record, lost its bid for election to the board of UN Women after furious back-channel diplomacy by the United States and its allies. Still, at the games, which started in China on Saturday, Iran will field 92 female athletes in its 395-strong delegation.
Welcome to the ugly world of wrangling over women's rights records depending on whether “we” like you or not.
Don't misunderstand — Iran deserves to be kept out of UN Women. Iranian Nobel laureate Shirin Ebadi had warned just before the vote that it was a “joke” that her country was in line to get a place on the board. But she said the same of Saudi Arabia, rightly pointing out that its women's rights record was worse than Iran's.
It's not as if the UN was unaware of that abysmal record. After all, who could forget the farce that ensued when a Saudi delegation appeared for the first time before the UN women's rights panel in Geneva in 2008 and absurdly insisted that women in their country faced no discrimination?
But the most ludicrous claim came when the UN committee asked why Saudi men could marry up to four wives. With a straight face, a Saudi delegate — a man, of course — explained that it was to ensure a man's sexual appetite was satisfied legally if one wife could not fulfill it.
Not surprisingly, then-UN special rapporteur on violence against women, Yakin Erturk, soon went to Saudi Arabia on a 10-day fact-finding mission.
So where was the outrage on voting day, Nov. 10, as Saudi Arabia's “generous contribution” landed it on UN Women's board?
Distracted, at best.
U.S., European Union, Australian and Canadian diplomats had been working hard to kick Iran off the list of 10 countries from the Asian region up for election to the board. Iran — which for weeks has been threatening to stone a woman for alleged adultery — does not belong on the board.
But it was disgusting to hear American ambassador to the UN Susan E. Rice celebrate Iran's defeat and yet, when pushed on Saudi Arabia, say only that she would “not deny that there were several countries that are going to join the board of UN women that have less than stellar records on women's rights, indeed human rights.”
Once again, women are the cheapest bargaining chips, thrown on the table to silence and appease allies and “major donors.”
Why are countries such as Saudi Arabia eager to join international bodies like UN Women? Because it translates into clout — membership in a powerful new agency — with very few obligations.
In 2000, Saudi Arabia ratified an international bill of rights for women but stipulated that the country's interpretation of Islamic law (Sharia) would prevail if there were conflicts with the bill's provisions. So why sign in the first place? Especially as that interpretation is where so much discrimination against women originates — polygamy, half inheritance allotted to a man, little access to divorce and child marriage among them.
Other countries also hide behind those reservations, which begs the question of why they're allowed to sign conventions they effectively neuter.
It's worth noting here that the U.S. hasn't ratified the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women, so it doesn't stand on the firmest of ground when it wants to lecture others.
And a day after the U. N. Women fiasco, the U.S. joined China, Iran, Sudan, Saudi Arabia and others in opposing the call of a UN General Assembly human rights committee for a moratorium on the death penalty.
Human rights groups have vowed extra scrutiny for Saudi Arabia, and some Saudi women have said it could help them to have that additional spotlight on the kingdom. But as long as Saudi Arabia has that way out — the religion card — it makes a mockery of the system.
Saudi activists courageously fight against a compendium of horrors that girls and women face, but international acquiescence to oil — the kingdom sits on the world's largest reserves — and the fact that Saudi Arabia is home to Islam's two holiest sites too often guarantee it a free pass.
If UN Women is to have any bite, it should focus on justice for Saudi women and not on their country's “generous contributions.”
Monday, May 11th, 2009
By Mona Eltahawy
May 25, 2009 Jerusalem Report
I am terrified of thunder. My mother thinks its rumbles trigger in me memories of the sound of bombs falling. She was pregnant with me during the 1967 war and remembers that whenever a bomb fell she would feel me kick inside her.
During most of her pregnancy my parents were in Port Said, on the Mediterranean coast. They had met and fallen in love in medical school in Cairo, married after their graduation and headed to the coast for their year as interns. My parents joke they just wanted to spend the year by the sea, but their departure from Cairo to Port Said was typical of the wanderlust that grips my family.
My mum – the eldest of 11 – became a doctor and left Egypt for the U.K. to get a PhD in medicine. She was of the generation that made the huge leap from “East” to “West.” She has three children. She was 43 when she gave birth to my sister, who is 19 years younger than I. I am of the generation that straddles that “East” and “West.” I have lived in Egypt, the U.K., Saudi Arabia, Israel and now the United States. I am a journalist and public speaker. I was briefly married and at almost 42 have no children and do not want any.
I can’t escape restlessness. So at the end of 1997 when it was a choice of applying for emigration to Canada or moving to Israel as a Reuters correspondent, I moved to Jerusalem and stepped into the arms of trouble that continues to this day with Egyptian State Security, which regards with great suspicion any Egyptian who lives in Israel.
Was I a silly romantic for thinking Cairo winked at me whenever I came home to her from Israel? Were those street lights celebrating my return or letting me know they were in on my illicit trips?
Illicit because I wasn’t supposed to be in Israel. Illicit because returning to Cairo meant coming home to see an increasingly impatient boyfriend. Every time I said yes I would marry him I quickly balked, terrified of standing still. Illicit because I would often also visit my parents and sister, who at the time lived in Saudi Arabia. I didn’t know anyone else whose itinerary was Tel Aviv – Cairo – Jeddah in the space of a week.
Just four years later, another leap, another country. I was taking photographs of adobe buildings in Santa Fe, New Mexico, when I heard the words of the Koran. I thought I was either losing my mind or that I missed the Middle East so much I was hallucinating.
But it was for real and it was coming from a silver shop behind me. I entered, in search of an explanation. The store clerk explained the owner was a Muslim and brought him out to talk to me. He told me he’d put on a tape of a Koran recitation to mark the first day of Ramadan, the fasting month.
It turned out that Palestinians in New Mexico and Arizona basically ran the silver market. They would go to the reservations and buy silver from the Native Americans, which they would then in turn sell in the cities. He insisted I return later to break the fast with him and his cousin. How could I turn down the opportunity to learn more about how the dispossessed of today were running the silver business along with the dispossessed of yesterday? And how could I turn down an iftar (the evening meal for breaking the fast) at Applebee’s with the Palestinian cousins Mohammed and Abdel-Karim, who in Santa Fe were now Al and Mike?
I was in the middle of an epic 18-day road trip across America. Just a few weeks earlier I had put pen to divorce papers to end the marriage that had brought me to the U.S. in 2000. So when my marriage ended, I knew there was only one city in the U.S. that could possibly contain my restlessness. And I knew I had to drive to get there – no getting on a plane and starting a new life five hours later. America and I needed time. I was both Thelma and Louise but I wasn’t going to drive off a cliff. I wasn’t done moving and besides, I had people to see, like American artist Georgia O’Keeffe, who was the reason I came to Santa Fe.
Before my iftar at Applebee’s with Al and Mike, I went to the museum dedicated to O’Keeffe. Rebelliousness. Freedom. Independence. I found them all on the walls of the museum but it was a poster I bought at the gift shop that gave my life so far sense. It was a photograph of O’Keeffe on the back of a motorbike, grinning as she contemplated the journey ahead. It was part of an exhibition called “Women Who Got Away.”
That night after iftar at Applebee’s, Mohammed a.k.a. Al put his hand on mine and said he felt like he’d known me his whole life. I pulled my hand away and told him that was nice.
The next morning I left Santa Fe, destination New York City. •
May 25, 2009 Jerusalem Report
I am terrified of thunder. My mother thinks its rumbles trigger in me memories of the sound of bombs falling. She was pregnant with me during the 1967 war and remembers that whenever a bomb fell she would feel me kick inside her.
During most of her pregnancy my parents were in Port Said, on the Mediterranean coast. They had met and fallen in love in medical school in Cairo, married after their graduation and headed to the coast for their year as interns. My parents joke they just wanted to spend the year by the sea, but their departure from Cairo to Port Said was typical of the wanderlust that grips my family.
My mum – the eldest of 11 – became a doctor and left Egypt for the U.K. to get a PhD in medicine. She was of the generation that made the huge leap from “East” to “West.” She has three children. She was 43 when she gave birth to my sister, who is 19 years younger than I. I am of the generation that straddles that “East” and “West.” I have lived in Egypt, the U.K., Saudi Arabia, Israel and now the United States. I am a journalist and public speaker. I was briefly married and at almost 42 have no children and do not want any.
I can’t escape restlessness. So at the end of 1997 when it was a choice of applying for emigration to Canada or moving to Israel as a Reuters correspondent, I moved to Jerusalem and stepped into the arms of trouble that continues to this day with Egyptian State Security, which regards with great suspicion any Egyptian who lives in Israel.
Was I a silly romantic for thinking Cairo winked at me whenever I came home to her from Israel? Were those street lights celebrating my return or letting me know they were in on my illicit trips?
Illicit because I wasn’t supposed to be in Israel. Illicit because returning to Cairo meant coming home to see an increasingly impatient boyfriend. Every time I said yes I would marry him I quickly balked, terrified of standing still. Illicit because I would often also visit my parents and sister, who at the time lived in Saudi Arabia. I didn’t know anyone else whose itinerary was Tel Aviv – Cairo – Jeddah in the space of a week.
Just four years later, another leap, another country. I was taking photographs of adobe buildings in Santa Fe, New Mexico, when I heard the words of the Koran. I thought I was either losing my mind or that I missed the Middle East so much I was hallucinating.
But it was for real and it was coming from a silver shop behind me. I entered, in search of an explanation. The store clerk explained the owner was a Muslim and brought him out to talk to me. He told me he’d put on a tape of a Koran recitation to mark the first day of Ramadan, the fasting month.
It turned out that Palestinians in New Mexico and Arizona basically ran the silver market. They would go to the reservations and buy silver from the Native Americans, which they would then in turn sell in the cities. He insisted I return later to break the fast with him and his cousin. How could I turn down the opportunity to learn more about how the dispossessed of today were running the silver business along with the dispossessed of yesterday? And how could I turn down an iftar (the evening meal for breaking the fast) at Applebee’s with the Palestinian cousins Mohammed and Abdel-Karim, who in Santa Fe were now Al and Mike?
I was in the middle of an epic 18-day road trip across America. Just a few weeks earlier I had put pen to divorce papers to end the marriage that had brought me to the U.S. in 2000. So when my marriage ended, I knew there was only one city in the U.S. that could possibly contain my restlessness. And I knew I had to drive to get there – no getting on a plane and starting a new life five hours later. America and I needed time. I was both Thelma and Louise but I wasn’t going to drive off a cliff. I wasn’t done moving and besides, I had people to see, like American artist Georgia O’Keeffe, who was the reason I came to Santa Fe.
Before my iftar at Applebee’s with Al and Mike, I went to the museum dedicated to O’Keeffe. Rebelliousness. Freedom. Independence. I found them all on the walls of the museum but it was a poster I bought at the gift shop that gave my life so far sense. It was a photograph of O’Keeffe on the back of a motorbike, grinning as she contemplated the journey ahead. It was part of an exhibition called “Women Who Got Away.”
That night after iftar at Applebee’s, Mohammed a.k.a. Al put his hand on mine and said he felt like he’d known me his whole life. I pulled my hand away and told him that was nice.
The next morning I left Santa Fe, destination New York City. •
America, a Mosque and Me
The Jerusalem Report September 13, 2010
When the planes flew into the World Trade Center in New York on September 11, 2001, I was living in Seattle, on the other side of America. My brother and his wife were visiting me. We did not leave the house for two days because we were worried that Americans angry at Muslims would attack my sister-in-law, who wore a hijab.
On September 13, 2001, one such angry American – Patrick Cunningham – tried to start a fire in my local mosque’s parking lot. When two Muslims coming out from night prayers tried to stop him, Cunningham – who was drunk – tried to shoot them; he missed, then jumped into his car and drove into a tree.
When we heard what had happened, we drove to the mosque and were moved to see flowers and messages of support already flooding its entrance. And from that night on and for weeks more, neighborhood men and women holding signs that read “Muslims are Americans” stood on 24-hour guard outside the mosque.
Compassion was not one-sided. Issa Qandil, a Jordanian immigrant to the US, who was one of the two Muslim men Cunningham had tried to shoot, told authorities he forgave Cunningham and wanted to drop the charges.
The Seattle Weekly newspaper said that wasn’t possible but that Qandil’s attitude of forgiveness facilitated a plea bargain. Qandil visited Cunningham in jail and told him that he understood why he did what he did and that he forgave him. Qandil even testified at Cunningham’s sentencing hearing, saying that retribution was useless and asked the court to be lenient. Cunningham got six and a half years instead of 75.
According to the newspaper, Cunningham wrote a four-page, handwritten apology to the mosque in which he referred to “the two brave men of your congregation.” The attempted attack on the mosque in Seattle ended without harm but other attacks were successful.
The year after 9/11, I ended my marriage to the American I moved to the United States to be with. Up until that point, I hadn’t been alone with America. So when I signed my divorce papers, I got into my car for 18 days – just America and me. And paranoia: just before I left a group of Muslim men had been stopped on the highway. Apparently, a customer at a diner they’d just frequented had heard them speaking Arabic (not sure how she knew it was Arabic as most Americans wouldn’t recognize it from Swahili, say) and called the police, saying they were acting “suspiciously.”
My 18 days alone with America were a pilgrimage of sorts. When I first moved from Egypt to the US in the summer of 2000, I vowed I would not join any Muslim community in the US; I wanted to find my own way as a Muslim in my new home.
Each of the cities I’ve lived in throughout my life have heralded a new stage in my faith. I became a feminist in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia when I realized that the Islam we practiced at home was so different from that outside, which so often discriminated against women. I became a liberal Muslim in Jerusalem, where I lived in 1998 and where my ultra-Orthodox Jewish neighbors reminded me of the ultra-conservative Muslims in Saudi Arabia. My journey towards liberal Islam required solitude in Seattle, communion between me and America on the road, and then resolution in New York.
Soon after the end of that road trip, I came across Muslim WakeUp, a liberal Muslim website that led me to a community of like-minded Muslims. For the first time in my life, I felt comfortable sharing my ideas and values.
It is only in Cairo, my original hometown, and New York City where I feel no self-consciousness – not about who I am, what I believe, or what I look like that I am perfectly at home.
I will not surrender that comfort as birds of a feather plan to flock to NYC for a hatefest to mark the ninth anniversary of 9/11. The right-wing group “Stop Islamization of America” will be hosting a rally against the proposed Islamic Community Center in Lower Manhattan. Attending will be a who’s who of bigots – former speaker of the US House of Representatives Newt Gingrich, former US ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton, publisher Andrew Breitbart, and, most notoriously, the far-right Dutch parliamentarian Geert Wilders, who has called my religion “the ideology of a retarded culture.”
There is talk of a counter-rally. I am sure my city – where I marched in two demonstrations against the invasion of Iraq – will tell the bigots what several New Yorkers said at those anti-war rallies: “Not in our name.”
From liberals and feminists, unsettling silence on rending the Muslim veil
By Mona Eltahawy washington post
Saturday, July 17, 2010; A13
The French parliament's vote this week to ban full-length veils in public was the right move by the wrong group.
Some have tried to present the ban as a matter of Islam vs. the West. It is not. First, Islam is not monolithic. It, like other major religions, has strains and sects. Many Muslim women -- despite their distaste for the European political right wing -- support the ban precisely because it is a strike against the Muslim right wing.
Some have likened this issue to Switzerland's move last year to ban the construction of minarets. On the one hand, it is preposterous to compare women's faces -- their identity -- to a stone pillar. Minarets are used to issue a call to prayer; they are a symbol of Islam. The niqab, the full-length veil that has openings only for the eyes, is a symbol only for the Muslim right.
But underlying both bans is a dangerous silence: liberal refusal to robustly discuss what it means to be European, what it means to be Muslim, and racism and immigration. Liberals decrying the infringement of women's rights should acknowledge that the absence of debate on these critical issues allowed the political right and the Muslim right to seize the situation.
Europe's ascendant political right is unapologetically xenophobic. It caricatures the religion that I practice and uses those distortions to fan Islamophobia. But ultra-conservative strains of Islam, such as Salafism and Wahhabism, also caricature our religion and use that Islamophobia to silence opposition. Salafi ideology, which is unapologetically misogynistic, has left its imprimatur on Islam globally by convincing too many Muslims that it is the purest and highest form of our faith.
The strains of Islam that promote face veils do not believe in the concept of a woman's right to choose and describe women as needing to be hidden to prove their "worth." Salafism and Wahhabism preach that women will burn in hell if they are not covered from head to toe -- whether they live in Saudi Arabia or France. There is no choice in such conditioning. That is not a message Muslims learn in our holy book, the Koran, nor is the face veil prescribed by the majority of Muslim scholars.
The French ban has been condemned as anti-liberal and anti-feminist. Where were those howls when niqabs began appearing in European countries, where for years women fought for rights? A bizarre political correctness tied the tongues of those who would normally rally to defend women's rights.
There are several ideological conflicts here: Within Islam, liberal and feminist Muslims refuse to believe that full-length veils are mandatory. In Saudi Arabia, where the prevalence of face veils is great, blogger Eman Al Nafjan wrote a post on Saudiwoman supporting the French ban: "I have heard Saudi women, who are conditioned to believe that covering is an unquestionable issue, sigh as they watch uncovered women on TV and say, 'They get this world, and we get the afterlife.' These are the women 'choosing' to cover, brainwashed into living to die."
But the problem is not just "over there." Feminist groups run by Muslim women in various Western countries fight misogynistic practices justified in the name of culture and religion. Cultural relativists, they say, don't want to "offend" anyone by protesting the disappearance of women behind the veil -- or worse.
For example, French women of North African and Muslim descent launched Ni Putes Ni Soumises (Neither Whores Nor Submissives) in response to violence against women in housing projects and forced marriages of immigrant women in France. That group supports the ban and has denounced the racism faced in France by immigrant women and men.
Cultural integration has failed, or not taken place, in many European countries, but women shouldn't pay the price for it.
Europe's liberals must ask themselves why they have been silent. It is clear that Europe's political right -- other countries have similar bans in the works -- does not care about Muslim women or their rights.
But Muslims must ask themselves the same question: Why the silence as some of our women fade into black, either as a form of identity politics or out of acquiescence to Salafism?
The pioneering Egyptian feminist Hoda Shaarawi famously removed her veil in 1923, declaring it a thing of the past. Almost a century later, we are foundering. The best way to support Muslim women would be to oppose both the racist political right wing and the niqabs and burqas of the Muslim right wing. Women should not be sacrificed to either.
Let's move away from abstract discussions and focus on the realities of women. The French were right to ban the veil in public. Those of us who really care about women's rights should talk about the dangers in equating piety with the disappearance of women.
Mona Eltahawy is an Egyptian-born writer and lecturer on Arab and Muslim issues.
Generation Mubarak/Generation Facebook
25th JUN 2010
NEW YORK – When a young Egyptian died from what his family, activists and witnesses say was a savage police beating, many of his peers – the generation of Egyptians who have known no other leader than President Hosni Mubarak – protested and mourned in the way they know best: by going online.
Generation Mubarak is also Generation Facebook.
Two young Egyptian Facebook friends alerted me to Said’s death with a link to the page“I am Khaled Said” which was set up on June 11, five days after he died. It now has more than 225,000 fans.
Many Egyptians on Facebook changed their profile picture to one of Said alive - bright eyed, clean cut, looking barely old enough to shave despite his 28 years. Others switched to a picture of his corpse – teeth missing, lip torn, jaw broken and blood pouring from his head. His family has confirmed it is indeed his shattered body.
But Generation Facebook doesn’t just vent online. Facebook, Twitter andYouTube aren’t just for party pictures or flirting but have become slingshots aimed at a regime Generation Mubarak never imagined they could take on.
Social networking sites connect activists with ordinary people who are joining demonstrations in numbers unheard of in Egypt: a protest outside the Interior Ministry in Cairo was the largest jn living memory against police brutality.
In Alexandria, Said’s hometown, up to 8,000 Egyptians wearing black protested along the corniche; some recited verses of the Koran and Bible.
Generation Facebook moves to fill in the holes of mainstream media. Blogger and citizen journalist Mohamed Abdelfattah, recorded an on-camera interview with witnesses to Said’s death (it was picked up by an independent Egyptian daily) and filmed that Alexandria silent protest (it has gone viral).
Generation Facebook’s embrace of the social networking site has made Egypt its number one user in the Arab world and 23rd globally. Egypt has the highest number of blogs in the Arabic-speaking Middle East.
The Interior Ministry claims Said died after swallowing a pack of drugs. Activists say undercover police beat him to death after he posted an Internet video, which his family said showed police sharing the profits of a drug bust.
After the public outrage, including at his funeral in Alexandria which at least 1,000 people attended, a new autopsy was ordered but it just confirmed the ministry’s initial claim. Generation Facebook went into action: the Khaled Said Facebook page urged Egyptians to dress in black and to hold silent protests across the country.
Many Egyptians replaced their profile pictures with banners announcing the place and time of the protest they would be attending.
At anti-police brutality protests on June 12, activists held banners with a picture of Mubarak next to one of Said before and after his death. In power 29 years, Mubarak is the longest serving ruler in Egypt’s modern history. For every one of those years Egypt has been under a state of emergency that has turned it into a police state where torture is systematic and where there are an estimated 12,000 to 14,000 detained persons.
That juxtaposition of pictures of Said alive and dead chillingly brought home for Generation Mubarak what living under Emergency Law their entire lives has meant. If any thought arbitrary arrests and detention happened to others – political activists or the outlawed Muslim Brotherhood - they learned that Said was involved with neither.
If they imagined police brutality was confined to criminals or the poor, such as 13-year old Mohamed Abdel-Aziz whose battered body brought prosecutors to tears in 2007 as they examined his family’s allegations that he was beaten and electrocuted by police who arrested him for allegedly stealing four packs of tea, then Said’s shattered face was their wakeup call.
Occasionally a few officers are convicted of torture but they usually return to their jobs after cosmetic sentences. That won’t change as long as Emergency Law is in effect. A month before Khaled Said’s death it was extended for two more years.
Blogs and social networking didn’t invent courage – activists have been protesting against Mubarak for years – but have connected Egyptians and amplified their voices.
In 2007, two police officers were sentenced to three years in jail for sodomizing a bus driver with a stick. Evidence used against them included video the officers shot of the assault that blogger Wael Abbas posted to his site.
Dozens more videos exposing police brutality have gone online. There’s an anti-torture website with a hotline to report incidents. There’s another with advice on what to do if you’re tortured or beaten up by police.
Egyptians make another link – between Mubarak and successive U.S. administrations which for years have been his biggest ally and whose support has been vital for his 29-year political survival.
It’s not just U.S. administrations that have ignored Mubarak’s oppressive rule. Media focus on Iranian demonstrators and online activists who deservedly garner headlines for their courage but those same media outlets ignore their Egyptian counterparts because Mubarak is “our friend” and stands stalwartly against the kind of Muslim fundamentalists who run Iran.
“Khaled is our Neda,” Generation Facebook says, citing the young Iranian woman whose death in a post-election Tehran demonstration last year was captured by mobile phone.
If she was the everywoman whose on-camera demise shook our eyes open to the Iranian regime’s brutality, then Khaled Said’s shattered face could belong to any one of Generation Mubarak.
By Mona Eltahawy The Jerusalem Report April 26, 2010
"You're beginning to look like them,"
An Egyptian policeman told me one day at Cairo airport during the year I lived in Israel. As had become routine upon my arrival to or departure from Cairo, I had to clear security. As I waited, chats with police officers were usually a variation of the following:
"Why do you live in Israel?"
"What's it like in Israel?"
"Aren't you scared to live there?"
But this time, at the end of that usual string, one of the policemen took me aback with his comment about my how I was beginning to look like them.
"Who's them?" I asked.
"The Israelis. You're beginning to look like them," he elaborated. "I see the tourists who come through the airport. You look just like them"
During my year in Jerusalem, I had lost count of the number of times people had talked to me in Hebrew. I knew I could easily pass for a Moroccan or a Yemeni Jew. So I guess I did "look like them."
It is that "passing" – that "looking like them" – that lies at the heart of the new British film "The Infidel," written by comedian David Baddiel. The film stars Omid Djalili as a British Muslim cab driver who finds out he's actually Jewish.
To add to the ethnic mirroring the film tries to explore, Djalili is actually Bahai and is the British-born son of Iranians. Baddiel is himself from a Jewish family but identifies as atheist. In interviews, he has said that the two times he has been beaten up served as inspirations for the kind of ethnic confusion his screenplay explores – the first beating came for being Jewish and the second was when he was mistaken for being Pakistani.
"It did occur to me to tell the people who were punching me: 'No, you don't understand, I'm actually Jewish,' like that would make a big difference," he has said.
I am eager to see the film which went on general release in the UK on April 9. I was on a BBC World Service Radio program on which Baddiel was also a guest and during our conversation around the film he said Israel was the only country in the Middle East that hadn't scheduled a release for "The Infidel." According to Baddiel it apparently was in reaction to views on Israel he expresses in the film
In case you hadn't heard – and I wouldn't blame you after the disastrous overreactions of some of my coreligionists over the past few years to everything from cartoons to plays to paintings – Muslims have a sense of humor.
And if you don't believe me, I say, thank God for the Axis of Evil guys – a group of American-Muslim comedians whose ability to skewer themselves, their fellow Muslims and bigots everywhere has been one of the good things to come out of the post-9/11 hysteria around all things Muslim.
Laughing at oneself is both a rite a passage for immigrant groups and ethnic minorities but it is also one of the most deliciously and simultaneously subversive and creative tools against the powers that be.
For the uninitiated, the Axis of Evil comedy troupe is made up of four artists – Iranian-American Maz Jobrani, Palestinian-Americans Aaron Kader and Dean Obaidallah and Egyptian-American Ahmed Ahmed. They've brought tears of comedic delight to audiences across the U.S. as well as the Middle East. During a visit to Egypt in March, I learned they'd sold out the Cairo Conference Center, no mean feat considering their targets are both "us" and "them" and that they liberally sprinkle salty language across their routines and smash political, social as well as religious taboos.
A little less salty are the Allah Made Me Funny guys, another American-Muslim comedy troupe which includes the irrepressible Azhar Usman whose beard is big enough to scare the wits out of you – and he knows it. He jokes about how he's profiled by non-Muslims and Muslims alike.
And it's not just Muslim men who are making us laugh, albeit uncomfortably at times. British-Muslim comedienne Shazia Mirza was doing the rounds of comedy clubs long before the Axis of Evil formed. As someone who was aghast at being groped during a pilgrimage to Mecca, I was especially delighted by her joke about feeling a hand on her backside while performing the rites at Islam's holiest sites and thinking that it must be the hand of God.
A comedian I saw on a U.S. news segment on Muslim comedy - whose name I'm embarrassed to say I've forgotten - beautifully expressed the irony of being Muslim in post-9/11 America when he reminisced over how times had changed from the days when as a skinny kid at school he was often the target of quite a bit of bullying and yet here he was – the same skinny kid whose mere presence as a Muslim strikes fear into those around him.
Which brings me back nicely to David Baddiel being beaten up for being Jewish and for being mistaken for a Pakistani. It's good to see the skinny wimp fight back with comedy.
I'm not so skinny but I live to confuse. "The Infidel" sounds like it does too.
Confronting Tyrants
By Mona Eltahawy
Jerusalem Report
May 24, 2010
Oslo – Listening to men and women women testify at the Oslo Freedom Forum in April, I thought how apropos it was that the night before I flew to Oslo I had attended a performance in London of “Macbeth,” Shakespeare’s depiction of a “bloody-sceptered” tyrant, which could’ve applied to any number of the dictators we heard of.
But what can prepare you to hear that when he was 9, Kang Chol-Hwan and his family were imprisoned at a North Korean concentration camp for 10 years. They ate snakes, frogs and rats to survive and buried dozens of fellow political prisoners, felled by starvation, exposure, hanging or execution bullets.
“I lived like an animal in the prison camp,” Kang told the Freedom Forum. “I appear normal because I have been eating well for 10 years in the free world.” After his release, Kang managed to flee North Korea, first to China and then South Korea to where he defected and where he works as a journalist and author.
I know very few people who defend North Korea. It wins, hands down, the (dis)honor of being the most closed, totalitarian state on earth. Even Myanmar – a close contender – has a few loose trapdoors. Armed with small handycams, a group of young Burmese journalists filmed the 2007 monks’uprising and smuggled footage out of Myanmar that director Anders Østergaard compiled into the Oscar-nominated documentary film “Burma VJ.” There is no equivalent for North Korea.
Beyond North Korea though, human rights has become a minefield in which political and religious baggage create bizarre explosions.
Witness the moral acrobatics of the global left last year as they tried to unsee Iranian security forces beating and shooting protesters. The baggage? Classic enemy-of-my-enemy: Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad “stands up” to the U.S. and Israel.
Where was the right wing? Their obsession with abortion and homosexuality blinds them to most other things.
Alternately, witness the Jewish outrage and accusations of anti- Semitism hurled at Judge Richard Goldstone, the internationally respected jurist whose report for the UN concluded that both sides committed war crimes in Gaza in 2008/9. The baggage? Goldstone is Jewish. He was almost barred from his grandson’s bar-mitzva.
If we reduce human rights to our position for or against the US or Israel, we mock the courage of Rebiya Kadeer, the Uighur leader and activist from the northwest Chinese region of Xinjiang who opened the Oslo Forum. Known as “Mother of the Uighur Nation,” Kadeer was imprisoned by China for five years – two in solitary confinement – and currently lives in exile in the US. China has also imprisoned two of her sons. Kadeer advocates non-violent struggle against China.
Ethnic violence in Xinjiang in July left 200 dead. Separatist militants from the mainly Muslim Uighur community have been waging a campaign for independence against Beijing for the limits it puts on their cultural and religious traditions. Since the 9/11 attacks, China has increasingly portrayed the separatists as al-Qaeda allies.
Frustrated by silence over China’s crackdown on Xinjiang, I have to wonder if – in the case of Muslim-majority countries – it’s because the country oppressing fellow Muslims is neither the US nor Israel and Uighurs aren’t as cuddly as Tibetans. I assure them Kadeer emanates an aura that is both tenacious and grandmotherly.
“Indifference is not an option,” Kadeer said. “Wherever there is evil and people are suffering at the hands of brutal governments we cannot remain silent. My people are living in an open air prison, that’s why I must speak out. I speak out peacefully. They
use guns, yet still they are afraid of me because they are afraid of truth.”
To reduce human rights to our position on the US and Israel is to turn a blind eye to the courage of Yemeni journalist Abdelkarim Al-Khaiwani, former editor-in-chief of Al-Shoura newspaper and long-time critic of Yemen’s ruler since 1978, President Ali Abdullah Saleh.
Al-Khaiwani has been kidnapped, severely beaten, threatened with death and in 2008 was jailed, but released after an international outcry prompted a presidential pardon.
“There are 300 court cases against newspapers and journalists. Nine editors are facing charges of treason that could lead to execution,” Al-Khaiwani said. “Yemen has become more dangerous for journalists on trial than terrorists. A journalist was sentenced to 10 years in prison, while a wanted terrorist got just five.”
Organizers of the Freedom Forum said one of their aims was to try to get around that baggage that weighs down human rights by inviting speakers and delegates from almost 40 countries and numerous perspectives. Critics on the left and the right complained about some of the speakers and a Moroccan blogger asked me how a human rights forum
in 2010 could ignore the “war on terror.”
There is no need to choose in our condemnation. Surely, we can condemn both the mockery of justice that is Guantanamo as well as North Korean concentration camps? Surely we can call for an investigation into the actions of both Israel and Hamas? An Afghan schoolgirl recovering from Taliban poison is not relieved that her assailants are fellow Muslims.
Wherever they occur, human-rights violations, like those perpetrated by the bloody tyrant Macbeth, should be universally condemned.
