Informed Comment

Hisham Fageeh’s satirical take on a Bob Marley classic:

and,

ITN reports on this weekend’s protests and interviews Saudi women activists:

Posted in Saudi Arabia, women | 8 Comments

Malala Yousafzai has won the Sakharov Prize for free speech and human rights.

Jon Queally writes at Commondreams.org:

” Malala Yousafzai, the sixteen-year-old girl shot in the head by Taliban members in her native Pakistan for speaking out for women's right to education, is calling out the U.S. government and her own for refusing to do what seems obvious to her: hold peace talks.

Now living in the UK following surgeries for her wounds and ongoing rehabilitation, Yousafzai gave an interview to the BBC in which she called on the U.S to make efforts to end the war taking place in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

"The best way to solve problems and to fight against war is through dialogue," she told the BBC. "That's not an issue for me, that's the job of the government… and that's also the job of America."

Karzai bucks BSA

Meanwhile, as the possibility of talks between the Afghan Taliban have stalled once again ahead of next year's deadline set by President Obama, a negotiated peace seems as far away as ever.

At a press conference on Monday, Afghan President Hamid Karzai said he is not sure the U.S.—now in its thirteenth year of occupying the Central Asian country—can be trusted to respect Afghan sovereignty after 2014. And once again, Karzai is threatening not to sign a military agreement, called the Bilateral Security Agreement (BSA), designed to establish the ground rules for ongoing U.S. and NATO involvement in the country.

Karzai said he is unsatisfied with the behavior of the U.S. government, specifically citing the continued death of Aghan civilians by U.S. troops, aerial bombings by ISAF forces, and continued drone attacks.

Referring to the U.S and NATO leaders, Karzai said, "They want us to keep silent when civilians are killed. We will not, we cannot."

"The United States and Nato have not respected our sovereignty. Whenever they find it suitable to them, they have acted against it. This has been a serious point of contention between us and that is why we are taking issue of the BSA strenuously in the negotiations right now," Karzai said.

"They commit their violations against our sovereignty and conduct raids against our people, air raids and other attacks in the name of the fight on terrorism and in the name of the resolutions of the United Nations. This is against our wishes and repeatedly against our wishes," he continued.

Earlier this year, the Taliban opened an office in Qatar in order to pave the way for negotiations. So far, however, little or no progress has been made.

The 'forgotten war' and the years ahead

According to author Ann Jones, who recently wrote about the war in Afghanistan—officially America's longest—argued there is little comfort to be found as 2014 approaches. As in Iraq, she says, the destruction and hardships born of U.S. war will continue for decades.

"Even when the war 'ends' and Americans have forgotten it altogether, it won’t be over in Afghanistan," Jones writes. In fact, she adds, "It won’t be over in the U.S. either." She explains:

In Afghanistan, [...] as the end of a longer war supposedly draws near, the rate at which civilians are being killed has actually picked up, and the numbers of women and children among the civilian dead have risen dramatically.  This week, as the Nation magazine devotes a special issue to a comprehensive study of the civilian death toll in Afghanistan — the painstaking work of Bob Dreyfuss and Nick Turse — the pace of civilian death seems only to be gaining momentum as if in some morbid race to the finish.

Like Iraqis, Afghans, too, are in flight — fearing the unknown end game to come.  The number of Afghans filing applications for asylum in other countries, rising sharply since 2010, reached 30,000 in 2012. Undocumented thousands flee the country illegally in all sorts of dangerous ways.  Their desperate journeys by land and sea spark controversy in countries they’re aiming for.  It was Afghan boat people who roused the anti-immigrant rhetoric of candidates in the recent Australian elections, revealing a dark side of the national character even as Afghans and others drowned off their shores.  War reverberates, even where you least expect it.”

_________________________________________

Mirrored from Commondreams.org

Posted in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Pakistan Taliban, women | 20 Comments

The Burka Avenger is a children’s cartoon about a mild-mannered female school teacher in Pakistan who has an alter ego. As the black-clad Burka Avenger, she takes on oppressive and intolerant Taliban types with the power of education and books.

The concept, by rock star Haroon, is full of reversals and appropriations. Thus, the full black face-covering, or burka, is not customary among Muslims in India and Pakistan, where until recently most women went bare-headed in most circumstances, using a scarf-like diaphanous dupatta to cover their necks and chests and sometimes putting it on their heads. The burka or niqab, the full veil, is a Gulf custom spread in Pakistan by guest workers returning from places like Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, and it is decried by Pakistani feminists (and just non-Salafis) as a form of patriarchal oppression. The cartoon only uses it as a way for the heroine to remain anonymous while taking on . . . patriarchal repression.

CBS News has an excellent, balanced account:

and here is the English trailer:

Posted in Islam, Pakistan, Pakistan Taliban, Taliban, women | 6 Comments

“In her first speech since the Taliban in Pakistan tried to kill her for advocating education for girls, Malala Yousafzai celebrated her 16th birthday on Friday at the United Nations, appealing for compulsory free schooling for all children” [including for girls!]

Channel 4 News has video

Posted in Afghanistan, Human Rights, Pakistan, Taliban, Terrorism, women | 3 Comments

miriam cooke writes for ISLAMiCommentary *

*REVOLUTIONARY NARRATIVES: NAWAL EL SAADAWI AND SAMAER YAZBEK

ISLAMiCommentary Editor’s Note: This paper was written by miriam cooke and presented at the international forum—“Mediterranean Women’s Rights in the Aftermath of the Arab Uprisings” — on June 21, 2013 in Fez, Morocco, and shared with ISLAMiCommentary and TIRN. Note, that this was before the latest round of anti-Morsi protests in Egypt that began this past weekend.

Less than two years have elapsed since the outbreak of revolutionary activity around the Arab world and the narratives of participants are proliferating.[1] Each is compelling if, inevitably at this early stage, somewhat similar: surprise; engagement; euphoria; disappointment; sumud.. After the first few days of the recent Taksim uprising, author Elif Shafak commented, “After days of tension, citizens have started to exchange anecdotes. Suddenly everyone has a story to tell.”[2]

In the supposed absence of intellectuals’ voices and their bodies at the barricades, first-time writers are filling the gaps. People who never thought to write have put pen to paper. In some cases, the astonishing events and the individual’s involvement seemed enough, and they pushed out the poetic and the reflective, the stuff of literature that shapes and deepens our understanding of paradigm-changing events.[3]

Yet some intellectuals have been writing and participating. Their literary renditions provide another kind of lens on to the events of the past two years. Today, I will examine the revolutionary memoirs of two influential feminist writers, Egyptian Nawal El Saadawi (b.1931) and Syrian Samar Yazbek (b.1970). Both participated in their countries’ uprisings; both wrote about their hopes and disappointments.

El Saadawi situates her experience of Tahrir in a long line of revolutionary action going back to the mid-1940s when she was a student, and then even further back to 1919 when her father was a student demonstrating against the English occupation. Much younger than El Saadawi and born into an era of authoritarian regime that tolerated no protest let alone popular uprising, Samar Yazbek is living through her first revolution.

Beyond the difference in age, revolutionary experience, world recognition and literary output—Nawal has published over 30 books that have been translated into about the same number of languages; Samar has published three and only one has been translated—these memoirs reflect the very different trajectories of their people’s recent defiance of their dictators. Egypt’s revolution was over in 18 days with less than 1000 dead and Husni Mubarak gone, Syria’s revolution is in its third year, Bashar Asad is still in power and conservative estimates put the dead at over 90,000 with hundreds more dying on a weekly basis.

The situations are so different that it might not make sense to compare the memoirs were it not for a number of factors. Both women seem to have been born revolutionaries. Their writings have always insisted on the mandate to oppose injustice wherever it may be. Both crafted their reflections in the early summer of 2011, immediately after the outbreak of the simultaneous protest movements in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Bahrain, Qatif in Saudi Arabia, Syria and Yemen. Both have received international prizes for their contributions to their country’s revolutions. In November 2012, the International Peace Bureau in Dublin awarded Nawal and the Tunisian Lina Ben Mhenni the Sean MacBride Peace Prize. In October 2012, Samar was awarded the PEN/ Pinter International Writer of Courage prize and a month later the PEN Tucholsky prize in Sweden.

The Birth of a Revolutionary

What does it mean to say that these women seem to have been born revolutionaries? It means saying no to conventions from an early age. Nawal El Saadawi early defied the gendered expectations of Kafr Tahla. The first of her 3-volume Arabic autobiography Hayati Awraqi (1999) tells of her refusal to marry very young, of her determination to become a doctor and then to exchange medicine for creative and activist writing.

Sixty-six years later, in her 2013 Tahrir memoir Al-thawrat al-`arabiya, she thinks back to that day[4] and it is as though she is again “that schoolgirl walking in the demonstration and shouting: Down with the king! Down with the English! As though time did not exist” (2013: 97-99).

Keep reading Feminist Revolutionary Narratives from Egypt and Syria: Hopes and Disappointments (cook)

Posted in Egypt, Syria, women | 1 Comment

This is the “gallery filibuster” — shouting by pro-choice advocates in the Senate halls after Democratic Sen. Wendy Davis’s filibuster was shut down– that so delayed the vote on a proposed law virtually banning abortion in Texas that it took place too late to be valid.

Video of the ‘Gallery filibuster:

After a marathon filibuster by Democrat Wendy Davis was cut short, the Texas senate voted on a bill crafted to shut down almost all of the state’s abortion clinics. Democrats say that the vote came after midnight, making it void. Republicans insisted that it is valid. But early Wednesday morning, the state’s Lt. Governor declared that the vote came too late to pass.

Texas Republicans disregard the Supreme Court on this issue, but are delirious about the court’s gutting of the Voting Rights Act yesterday.

The Young Turks explains the new Texas abortion law and its implications.

Posted in al-Qaeda, Uncategorized, US politics, women | 4 Comments

Banu Gökariksel writes for for ISLAMiCommentary

Fatih neighborhood of Istanbul, 2009. photo by Banu Gökarıksel

Banu Gökarıksel

The veil is a piece of fabric that is politicized like no other. It is the persistent topic of fiery political debates and possibly the most stigmatized, praised, banned, and enforced article of clothing. And it continues to be one of the most misunderstood, stereotyped, and contested aspects of Muslim identities and politics across the world.

The veil is implicated in a wide range of cultural and (geo) political debates on women’s roles, Islam and Muslim cultures, secularism, democracy, terrorism, and war. In many of these debates, political leaders, pundits, and activists treat the veil as a symbol and speak for and about veiled Muslim women.

But the treatment of the veil as a symbol deprives veiled women of the public recognition of their humanity, with the effect of rendering them less than human in the eyes of some as the veil ‘stands in’ for the women and what they represent to the viewer — whether it is political Islam, the religion of Islam, secular or Islamically-oriented state projects, the Muslim umma, or a newly defined Muslim identity.

The veil often appears a convenient symbol of the Muslim Other to be feared, or alternatively, of the Muslim ideal to be upheld. Although many Muslim women do speak out, their experiences are seldom heard or listened to publicly.

This February the Duke/UNC Consortium for Middle East Studies took on the politically charged topic of veiling at its annual conference with several goals in mind: to examine the persistence of stereotypical representations of the veil; to understand the veil and its multiple meanings, styles, and practices; and to recognize Muslim women as subjects rather than dehumanized objects or icons.

To this end, the ReOrienting the Veil conference brought together an artist/activist and interdisciplinary group of scholars (from Religion, Anthropology, Francophone Studies, Geography, and History) and more than 100 students, university faculty, local K-12 teachers, and community members.

For artist/activist Todd Drake’s collaborative Esse Quam Videri: Muslim-American Self-Portraits project (a collection of images and accompanying essays that appeared at the Ackland Art Museum at UNC-Chapel Hill this winter) veiled women were photographed how they wanted to be viewed, empowered — whether laughing, playing basketball, or standing confidently with tools in hand in a car repair shop. (Conference participants were treated to a personalized tour of these images).

Beyond Stereotypes

Istanbul in contrast. photo by Banu Gökarıksel.

While veils come in all colors, sizes, shapes, and designs and are worn on the catwalk, on soccer fields, in classrooms, and on the street, photos of veiled women in mainstream western media or on popular book covers often portray the veil as a prison, (as in this one by French cartoonist Plantu), and veiled women often appear as solemn, sad, and victimized, if not ominous and threatening, explained Typhaine Lservot, Associate Professor in the Romance Languages and Literature Department and College of Letters at Wesleyan University.

Lservot devoted most of her presentation to an analysis of how the veil and veiled women were depicted in political cartoons at the height of the ‘burqa affair’ in France.

France is an important context for the analysis of the veil because of its history as a colonial power and exporter of negative images of Islam and the veil. France has taken aggressive steps to regulate the veil in its different forms, first banning the headscarf in schools in 2004 and then, after much public debate beginning in 2008, banning the niqab (face covering) from all public spaces in 2011. (The latter was referred to as the ‘burqa affair’).

She showed this 2005 cartoon by Steph Bergol, that plays on fears of losing French identity — envisioning France, in the future, as an Islamic republic where all women are veiled and the French flag no longer flies and is relegated to history.

Meanwhile, the veil and Iranian identity were at the heart of this cartoon published by the hardline Fars news agency in Iran, which depicts badly -veiled women as practically brainless – insulting Iranian women who don’t respect the hijab, i.e. don’t wear it properly.

Lservot’s nuanced analysis also showed that some of the political cartoons that appear stereotypical at first glance are much more complicated when one looks closely at them. Many actually include subtle critiques of sexism and racism in French society.

For example, one cartoon by Catherine Beaunez juxtaposes a woman in a miniskirt with one in full veil. Both think that the other is victimized by social norms. Thereby, the cartoon effectively questions the presumption that minimal clothing liberates while covering oppresses. She also showed a similar cartoon, by New Zealand cartoonist Malcom Evans called “Cruel Culture” that depicts a woman in bikini and a woman in a burqa looking at each other and thinking that the other is a victim of “a cruel male dominated culture.”

Some hijabis (a term for veiled Muslim women that is used by some) have responded, creating their own brand of humor. See an archive of cartoons here at Ninjabi.com. Or, another example, this Tweet by Hend (Libya Liberty) “I am having such a good hair day – no one even knows.”

De-linking Veiling from Islamic Extremism

Since the 1970s, many observers and scholars have pointed to the emergence of the veil as a newly significant practice; some described it as ‘re-veiling,’ some as ‘new’ veiling. As miriam cooke, Braxton Craven Distinguished Professor of Arab Cultures in Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at Duke University, explained in remarks at the conference, the veil’s (re)emergence has been connected to Muslim ethics, as well as neoliberal economic and political restructuring.

However, it was the 1979 Revolution in Iran, she said, that loaded the veil with explicit political meaning, filling the media with images of fully veiled women participating in street protests. Some of these images harkened back to the role Algerian women played in the violent resistance against French colonialism between 1954 and 1962. Such images of veiled women imprinted in the minds of many the association of veiling with Islamic extremism.

The very same images continue to color the perception of veiling today. Especially since 9/11, the mainstream media in the U.S. and Western Europe, but also in Turkey and Egypt, repeatedly has circulated stigmatizing images of Muslims highlighting the veil as a symbol of Islamist militancy.

These images project a singular, monolithic image of Muslim women — what cooke, in a 2007 essay for Contemporary Islam, called The Muslimwoman: “a newly entwined religious and gendered identification that overlays national, ethnic, cultural, historical, and even philosophical diversity. A recent phenomenon tied to growing Islamophobia, this identification is created for Muslim women by outside forces, whether non-Muslims or Islamist men. Muslimwoman locates a boundary between us and them.”

Lservot, in her presentation, showed this particularly offensive image by Steph Bergol of two veiled mothers pushing their “ticking time bomb” children in strollers. This militarized/terrorist/veiling theme is not an anomaly in his collection.

And these kinds of images and stereotypes persist.

In this commentary ”Hate and the Hijab,” Azizah editor Tayyiba Taylor references a November 2012 ISPU research paper — The Muslim ‘Veil’ Post-9/11: Rethinking Women’s Rights and Leadership — written by Sahar Aziz, Associate Professor of Law at Texas Wesleyan University of Law.

Sahar Aziz: “The debate no longer centers on whether the pejorative ‘veil’ serves to oppress women by controlling their sexuality and, by extension, their personal freedoms and life choices; or if it symbolizes choice, freedom, and empowerment. Rather, it now marks them as representatives of the suspicious, inherently violent, and forever foreign ‘terrorist other’ in our midst.”

Keep reading ReOrienting the Veil (Gökariksel)

Posted in Turkey, Uncategorized, women | 13 Comments