March 1, 2004

• In keeping with my previous post, I received this news article in my email and decided to share it. This article touches on Hussein and Bin Laden, but it is really more about women’s rights -which should be the real issue in the Middle East before anything else. The American governement thinks it’s so important it should decide policy for every other country, but they don’t care about individuals, only what will benefit them the most (them… not us). They build up the power base of people like Saddam and Bin Laden and many others before them in other countries, and then they tear them down again when their little robots get too powerful. And who is left to pay? Not the individuals the government goes after, but all the citizens of their countries. How fair is that? Especially when those same citizens never benefited from the US the way the individuals the US “adopted” did.

  
  

  But the article below is really not about governments or policy. Not really. It’s about women. Religion is one thing, but abuse is quite another. As Nawal al-Saadawi points out, nowhere in the Koran does it insist upon female veiling, censorship, or castration. Women are shells… slaves… brood mares. It’s truly abominable what they go through over there. It’s no wonder that the female suicide rate is so high in the Middle East. I am glad to be an American, but only for this reason.

  
  

  Even though I have heard that some immigrants have brought the practice of female genital mutilation here. I shudder to think of little girls coming to our “free” country, only to face the same horror they so lately escaped.

  
  

  The government is so keen on civil rights and protecting the innocent. Slavery is supposed to be something that humanity practiced in the past.

  
  

  So when is someone going to do something about the slavery still practiced in the Middle East? My personal motto has always been fair and equal treatment for all people of any race, creed, or SEX. I know that I cannot expect everyone in the world to agree with me on every subject, but some things should just be obvious to all people. shouldn’t they?

  
  

  A lot of cruelty in the world could be prevented if all people had the capacity or imagination to put themselves in the other person’s place. If only these men who mistreat women could be made to understand what it would be like if they were women themselves, changes would occur pretty darn quick. But it’s like that old joke, if men were the ones who gave birth, we’d be extinct in a generation. (Apologies to any compassionate males reading this! lol)

  
  

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  Has one of feminism’s great voices been drowned out?
  Egypt’s Nawal al-Saadawi says her message has been stifled, coopted

  
  

  http://www.dailystar.com.lb/features/01_03_04_c.asp 

  
  

  Ursula Lindsey – Special to The Daily Star

  
  

  CAIRO: From the balcony of her 14th-floor apartment, Nawal al-Saadawi looks out over the working-class neighborhood of Shubra, the Mahad Nasr Hospital and the Nile winding its way into the greener distances north of Cairo. It’s an appropriately sweeping view for someone who has always looked far beyond narrow, inherited perspectives. Yet these days Saadawi, Egypt’s pre-eminent feminist writer, keeps the shutters mostly drawn, saying the long hours she spends typing at the computer have made bright light painful to her eyes. Seated in her dim and modest living room, fulminating against local and international powers, Saadawi almost seems trapped in her pinnacle.

  
  

  It’s something she comments on herself. “Women are not liberated here … I am not liberated. I am in a cage. In my country, I am in a prison without bars.”

  
  

  Saadawi complains that she has been ostracized by the Egyptian government.

  
  

  “If I cannot speak on the TV, if I cannot write in the big newspapers, if I cannot speak on the radio, if I cannot teach in Cairo University … what’s this?” she asks.

  
  

  This unwilled silence is all the more frustrating for someone with so much to say. Speaking a propos of the recent ban on the veil in French schools, Saadawi is adamant that women who choose to wear the veil are the victims of “false consciousness,” of “brainwashing.” If she had a chance to speak to one of the young demonstrators wearing a tri-color veil in the streets of Paris, she “would tell her this is not your identity and not your religion. Because I am also from a Muslim background and I am not veiled and my identity is not to be veiled or to be circumcised

  
  

  “There are some people and some feminists, even in the US and England, who think that to respect multiculturalism and pluralism and democracy and authentic identity ­ they approve of the veil and circumcision. Because they think that the veil and female circumcision is part of our identity. It is an ignorance of Islam. The veil is not Islamic at all. Nothing in Islam refers to covering the head.”
  
  

  
  

  Saadawi seems irritated by the word “identity.”

  
  

  Warming to her subject, she exclaims, “What is the relationship of my identity to what I put on my head? Is your identity your hat?

  
  

  “The scarf has become a political symbol,” she continues, “of the political powers, of political Islam. The fight over the ban of the veil in France is a political fight, related to elections in France and the political powers in Egypt and other Islamic countries. It has nothing to do with identity of women or morality or even Islam.”

  
  

  Saadawi also has a lot to say about Iraq these days. Her capacity for indignation hasn’t diminished over time.

  
  

  “We are living in a world of deception,” she cries. “I was reading the newspaper today, and everything that George Bush says, or Kofi Anan, is all lies … Kofi Anan should punish George Bush. He should put him on trial as a war criminal, not talk with him and obey him and go to Iraq. Where are the sanctions (against the US)?”

  
  

  Saadawi lays a great amount of blame for the region’s problems on the US.

  
  

  “The damage of Saddam Hussein to the Iraqi people is much less than the damage of the US,” she says, going on to add that Osama bin Laden “was created by the US and given power by the US. And Al-Qaeda. And the Taleban. Who are the Taleban? Who gave power to the Taleban? The US gave power to bin Laden, to Saddam Hussein to fight Iran, and to the Taleban.”

  
  

  Saadawi was born in the early 1940s in the village of Kafr Tahla and grew up in relatively progressive middle class family. A bright young girl getting top grades at school and writing poetry by the moonlight late at night, she seems to have been preternaturally determined to escape the feminine role assigned her. Like her brothers and sisters, she went to university, where she studied medicine and worked as a doctor before focusing more on her role as a writer and activist.

  
  

  In the 41 books she has written ­ among them Daughter of Isis, Woman at Point Zero, God Dies by the Nile, The Circling Song, and The Fall of the Imam ­ she elaborates again and again on the theme of female oppression, a subject she first tackled when as a boarding school student she wrote, directed and acted in a clandestine play about an unwanted pregnancy. She has distinguished herself for the courage with which she straightforwardly addressed such “shameful” subjects as the widespread occurrence of female circumcision, molestation, incest and harassment.

  
  

  In her book The Hidden Face of Eve , she writes that “education of female children is therefore transformed into a slow process of annihilation, a gradual throttling of her personality and mind, leaving intact only the outside shell … A girl who has lost her personality, her capacity to think independently and to use her own mind, will do what others have told her and will become a toy in their hands and a victim of their decisions.”

  
  

  Saadawi has never hesitated to indict religious or political leaders for manipulating concepts of honor, tradition, Islam or morality to deprive Arab women of their rights. And both temporal and religious powers have struck back.
  
  

  
  

  Under the late President Anwar Sadat she lost her post as editor in chief of Health magazine and as assistant secretary-general of Egypt’s Medical Association. She was imprisoned  at the end of Sadat’s presidency as part of a general crackdown on the opposition. She based a play, Twelve Women in Kanater, on her three months spent in jail.

  
  

  “Our regime, this local regime, I am resisting all the time, up till today,” she says. “And that’s why I’m at home. I could have been a prime minister, or the minister of health, of anything. I could have been the editor of Al-Ahram. But why am I at home or living in exile, teaching in (foreign universities)? Why can’t I teach in my country, in Cairo University? Because I am speaking up … I am speaking my mind. I cannot submit to power.”

  
  

  This includes the power of the sacred. “Women are oppressed by all religions,” she says, “because they are patriarchal, religions … God is a male god of the sky … You cannot have a monopoly of power in heaven and democracy on earth … Since the evolution of one male sky god, you started to have a dictatorship in heaven and on earth.”

  
  

  In 1993, Saadawi and her husband Sherif Hatata went into self-imposed exile after she had been put on “a fundamentalist death list.” As recently as 2001, after she returned to Egypt, her comments on religion ­ in this case, critiquing some customs of the Hajj as remnants of “paganism” ­ led an enterprising Cairene lawyer, Nabih Wahsh, to file a hisba lawsuit against her. This is a rare form of legal action, which can be brought by a third party to separate a married couple if one of the spouses is suspected of apostasy. Saadawi was interviewed by a judge and Wahsh lost his case, but not after a good amount of media fanfare. Saadawi is effectively considered beyond the pale by most Egyptians, men and women.

  
  

  “The women who speak up, they close them, as happened with us in 1991,” she said, referring to the closure of the Arab Women Solidarity Association, which she founded in 1981 and which was the latest of her projects to be quashed, after a visit to Iraq in 1991 to protest the pending US invasion.

  
  

  “We have hundreds of NGOs, but they are governmental. We call them GONGOs … because if they are really NGOs, and not governmental, they must have the power to criticize the government. They say yes, yes, yes. And all of them work with (first lady) Suzanne Mubarak.”

  
  

  Saadawi mocks what she sees as the government’s hypocritical cooptation of the feminist movement, a choice dictated by foreign pressure and no genuine interest in women’s advancement, because, she says: “If they liberate half the society, women, they must liberate the other half, men.”

  
  

  “Suzanne Mubarak started the Women’s Council. How can you liberate women though the government? It’s like the Council of Human Rights. It’s ridiculous! The government established the Human Rights Council.” Saadawi laughs loudly. “My God! To punish itself!”

  
  

  Furthermore, Saadawi, who in her books gives several graphic accounts of her own circumcision at age 6, remains unconvinced by either the practical gains of the current anti-FGM campaign or its usefulness to the advancement of women.

  
  

  “Female circumcision is really separated from economic and mental and political circumcision. If you veil women, and you beat women and you starve women, and then you say, ‘but I am not going to cut your clitoris,’ this is ridiculous.”

  • 8:22 am
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