Tuesday, December 31, 2013
Because Traditions Must Be Respected!
Labels:
Just for Kicks,
Men of the Desert
Monday, December 30, 2013
Because The Struggle Continues...
(Anti-government protesters give roses, through razor wire, to the security personnel guarding the Defense Ministry as protesters gather outside it in Bangkok, November 28, 2013.)
(Supporters of European integration clash with riot police during a protest against government's decision to delay signing a trade deal with the European Union, in Kiev, Ukraine, December 1, 2013.)
(Indian women offer prayers for a gang rape victim at Mahatma Gandhi memorial in New Delhi,
India, January 2, 2013.)
Three years after crowds in Tunisia forced long-time dictator President Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali into flight, and kicked off what would later be termed the “Arab Spring,” the world’s streets remain alive with protest. The year 2013 saw incessant calls for change, with social media continuing to play a crucial role in mobilizing demonstrators.
The year’s first protests had been brewing for nearly a month in India, in response to the New Delhi gang-rape of a female student, who later died of her injuries. Violent demonstrations erupted across the Indian capital, where crowds turned out in droves to demand justice. Across the border in Pakistan in November, throngs massed to call for an end to U.S. drone strikes in the country’s mountainous borderlands near Afghanistan. NATO supply lines were blocked in a show of anger.
During the summer, Tahrir Square was reclaimed for a series of protests that eventually resulted in a military coup and the arrest of the popularly elected President Mohammed Morsi in early July. The installment of a military government, lauded by some but loathed by others, triggered counter protests from his supporters in the Muslim Brotherhood that were violently suppressed by the new junta. Then there were the student protests in Chile against the alleged profiteering of the country’s public education system, demonstrations in Istanbul over the removal of a historic park and the brave rallies held in Russia in defiance of state-enforced antigay policies.
At the year’s end, Thailand’s color-coded protests sprung to life after three years of calm. Middle class Yellow Shirts marched through their sprawling capital Bangkok to express revulsion for Prime Minster Yingluck Shinawatra and her exiled brother, Thaksin. Across the world in Ukraine’s capital Kiev, demonstrators braved frosty temperatures to call for closer ties with Europe. The revolution didn’t come to fruition in 2013, but it was most certainly televised. —David Stout
Labels:
State of the Nation
Thursday, December 26, 2013
Enter The Muslim Sisterhood...
Wafaa Hefny was not even born when her grandfather, Muslim Brotherhood founder Hassan al-Banna, was assassinated while waiting for a taxi on February 12, 1949.
But like many conservative Muslims, al-Banna’s teachings and doctrines had a profound effect on Hefny, a lecturer in English literature at al-Azhar University.
Since the military crackdown on the brotherhood after the overthrow of President Morsi last June, and as the second, third, and fourth tier of the organization have been dismantled and imprisoned, the brotherhood has increasingly relied on women.
With no traditional leadership at the moment, it is an inevitable – but paradoxical – role in an organization as traditional as the brotherhood. “But we are very strong women,” Hefny says. “We are taking up the role of men.”
In this Muslim-majority country, women – even well-educated ones – usually stay at home. Now they are taking on the Egyptian security forces, leading demonstrations, organizing protests and using social media to spread awareness.
Some students at Al Azhar, the epicenter of student protests against the army, have gone so far as to boldly call General Abdel Fattah al Sisi , who toppled Morsi, a traitor. The women’s awakening has trickled down from students to teenage girls.
According to Hoda abdel Moniem abdul-Aziz, a leader in the Freedom and Justice Party, the political wing of the brotherhood, there are around 3,000 women members of the Muslim Brotherhood.
“This is not recent,” she said. “Since the revolution started, women participated in a significant way. Women have always been a part of the brotherhood.”
After the January 25, 2011 revolution that toppled Hosni Mubarak, women entered a new phase of power. The sisters gathered in larger numbers at Tahrir Square and ran in parliamentary elections in the Freedom and Justice Party.
Abdul Aziz explained that the more repressive and brutal the police crackdown, the more women will respond: “Our blood is on the street, members of our organization have been killed. We went through the worst. We are not afraid of the police as long as we stick to our principles.”
Critics say the women are playing a superficial role in the brotherhood and they are still not its main decision-makers.
A senior Egyptian diplomat, speaking on background, implied that the women’s role was not crucial to the organization, but more of a superficial attempt to shield the real protestors. He said police are less likely to arrest women than men.
“The tactic is to put women in front of the protestors because they are less likely to be beaten or taken away,” he said. It is similar, he added, to what Palestinians do during their demonstrations, when women head the protests, shielding the shabbab, or youth, who are vulnerable to being beaten or arrested by Israeli forces.
But Hefny, in Cairo, argues that the women’s role in the brotherhood is both historical and imperative.
“The roles women are playing are roles they were trained to take,” she said. “This is a different kind of jihad. At this time the enemy is in our home. When the enemy comes at you, you have to fight back.”
She says many women were motivated to act when housewives were killed in protests and women were arrested inside their homes.
“This is the situation,” she said. “Men can’t tell us to stay at home when the police are coming inside our homes. Women have to come out.”
The Muslim Sisterhood is not new, but it is largely unreported. Founded by Hassan al-Banna six years after the formation of the brotherhood in Ismailya, Egypt in April 1933, he wanted to call it “The Muslim Sisters Group.” Initially, al-Banna wanted to give them separate leadership.
Their work was motivated by one of the pillars of the brotherhood ethos, to serve the community.
“My grandfather’s legacy was simple,” Hefny said. “He believed that we are here on this earth on a mission to bring justice. And justice does not spread until the word of Allah spreads.”
But sectarian struggles within the sisterhood made al-Banna decide to put the women under the central command of the Muslim Brotherhood. Though their role was not as politically weighty as the men, they had a place.
“He believed in the importance of women in society,” Hefny said of her grandfather. She was home in Cairo preparing one of her four sons for his exams. As she spoke, the electricity went down, one of the city’s frequent power blackouts. “This is our life,” she said wearily.
Describing what it was to grow up as the granddaughter of one of Islam’s most important thinkers, Hefny said she remembered her mother in the time of Gamal Abdel Nasser, the second president of Egypt, who planned the 1952 overthrow of the monarchy and was in power from 1956 to 1970.
“My mother and my aunt were extremely conservative women, not brought up in any way to be political or outspoken,” she said. Yet when her grandfather and uncle were arrested, her mother and aunt went out on the streets searching for them.
“They knocked on every embassy door,” she said. “Can you imagine what it took for women to do that? But they did. They were strong.”
Since August, when the Egyptian military stormed the encampments of the protestors during the pro-Morsi sit-ins, killing hundreds, most of the brotherhood leaders, among them Morsi, were arrested. Analysts describe the organization as “decimated.”
It is believed that hundreds are in detention. Last month, the government came under fire for abuses from human rights and other groups after a court sentenced 21 women and teenage girls to harsh prison terms for taking part in the protests. Since then, their sentences have been slashed and the women have been released.
Hefny and other women gather weekly to strategize and to study the works of her grandfather. “It’s a misconception that Islam is sexist,” she said. “The very day the Muslim Brotherhood was established, there was a sisterhood.”
Women in Egypt gained the right to vote after a popular but now-forgotten activist, Doria Shafiq, stormed Egypt’s parliament in 1951 to demand women’s suffrage. In the wake of the 2011 Tahrir Square protests, her story has been told and retold as an inspiration to young women.
Shafiq was instrumental in winning women the right to vote in 1956, but she was bitterly punished for it. In 1957, she was placed under house arrest by Nasser’s regime and spent the next 18 years in forced seclusion. Her writings were banned and her name expunged from the Egyptian press and textbooks.
In 1975 she killed herself by jumping from a balcony.
But while there are plenty of strong women like Shafiq and Hefny in Egypt, women are still being sidelined and marginalized in political life. Will the budding women’s movement in the brotherhood lead to more crucial roles for women in Middle Eastern politics?
“It’s not really new.… Back in 1994, the brotherhood came out in support of women being in Parliament,” explained Shadi Hamid, director of research from the Brookings Doha Center. “They could hold any position except head of state.”
But since the crackdowns, he said, the need for women to become involved has become more necessary. He said women are particularly effective at a local level. “It’s out of necessity, since the leadership of the brotherhood has been decapitated,” he said. “It’s kind of inevitable.”
Women are still not full members of the organization, he said, “By definition; it is called the brotherhood, and they are not fully integrated into the structures of the organization. They don’t have full voting rights.”
But Hamid adds that women can still be powerful in Egypt. One of Morsi’s senior advisors was Pakinam Sharqawy, an Iran expert and a professor at Cairo University. Always at the ousted president’s side, Sharqawy was technically not in the brotherhood – but she was a strong Islamist and one of his most trusted confidantes nonetheless.
“There is no theological obstacle to having a woman that senior in the brotherhood,” Hamid said. “The most important thing is sharing a worldview.”
Hefny says that women – and men – in Egypt will struggle until they get true democracy. She calls the women of the brotherhood “the conscience” of the organization.
“The movement is successful,” she said. “We have been prepared. And we won’t stand back until our country reaches its potential and cleanses Egypt of corruption. The genie is out of the lantern. You cannot put it back in once it has been let out.”
Janine di Giovanni, 19 Dec 2013 - http://www.newsweek.com/enter-muslim-sisterhood-224828
Labels:
State of the Nation,
Women of the Desert
Tuesday, December 24, 2013
Saturday, December 21, 2013
The Red Wedding...
SANAA, Yemen — On Dec. 12, near sunset, a convoy of vehicles carrying armed tribesmen that was part of a wedding procession was destroyed in an apparent U.S. drone strike. The attack, which occurred in Yemen's central al-Baydah province, was far from the first American strike in the area -- the United States is estimated to have carried out at least a dozen strikes against suspected al Qaeda targets in the province since the start of 2012. It was, however, the first time one of the strikes had made the grievous mistake of hitting a wedding.
The initial reports left me incredulous. As I started to make calls to sources in the area, it became clear the strike hit four cars in a convoy of about a dozen vehicles, killing at least a dozen people and wounding many more. The casualties were identified as members of local tribes. The information I received, as usual after such an event, was sometimes contradictory: While some sources stressed that those killed were all civilians, others seemed just as confident that some were indeed militants.
Whatever happened on Dec. 12, it was not a "targeted killing" -- the language President Barack Obama's administration often uses to describe drone strikes -- nor was it consistent with the White House's claim that the strikes are only carried out when civilians will not be caught in the crossfire. It's not just a matter of the morality of the drone program: The confirmed deaths of noncombatants in this strike will set back anti-al Qaeda efforts everywhere in Yemen, and its effects will only be exacerbated by the restive area where it occurred.
The strike was followed, as always, by silence from Washington, which has acknowledged carrying out drone strikes in Yemen but never publicly comments on individual attacks. The Yemeni government, however, released a statement the following day that said the strike targeted al Qaeda militants, but neglected to mention either the country that carried out the attack or the apparent civilian casualties. The actions taking place behind the scenes, though, painted a vastly different picture: Al-Baydah's governor was dispatched to mediate between the government and the families of the dead, while Yemeni officials that were previously supportive of the drone strikes cast the attack as a tragic error.
"Drones have saved lives, but they've also taken innocent lives," one official told me, speaking on the condition of anonymity due to the sensitivity of the issue. "And this strike personally shook me."
The exact nature of the error is still a matter of speculation. It was hard not to wonder if the wedding convoy was mistaken for something more sinister -- that someone in the bowels of the U.S. intelligence community concluded that vehicles carrying heavily armed wedding guests were actually an al Qaeda convoy. Some tribal contacts said that there were high-ranking militants near the site of the strike, and a Yemeni official briefed on security matters told me a vehicle hit in the attack had been linked to a prominent local al Qaeda leader.
Either way, any "suspected militants" present were surrounded by civilian bystanders.
In many ways, the northwest corner of al-Baydah province is an unlikely place for al Qaeda militants to carve out a base. Tensions with the central government are far from new, but the locals' ideology has historically taken a far different form: The area was a hotbed for leftist insurgents in the late 1970s and its residents are still over-represented in the ranks of Yemen's Socialist Party.
Looking back, the chain of events that transformed the area into a notorious "al Qaeda hotbed" seems almost like a perfect storm. In January 2011, militants affiliated with al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula led by Sheikh Tareq al-Dahab, a local tribal leader, took advantage of the government's weakness and seized control of the town of Rada', near where last week's drone strike occurred. While the fighters pulled out little more than a week later and their sheikh was killed in a longstanding family feud the following month, al Qaeda's presence in the area remained. The fighters have maintained their presence in and around Sheikh Tareq's hometown of al-Manaseh, expanding to other parts of the province and capitalizing on the central government's virtual absence.
Most importantly, perhaps, the group has had far more success in infiltrating local tribes in the area than they've had in other parts of the country. Al Qaeda has capitalized on their ties with a faction of the Dahab family -- which locals tend to see as sheikhs first and militant leaders second -- appearing to take great pains to avoid tensions with other tribesmen while exploiting widespread unemployment and anti-government sentiment to gain recruits.
The group's supporters still appear to constitute a fraction of those in the area. But even if locals lament the current status quo, few want to see a devastating conflict similar to the 2012 offensive that pushed al Qaeda-affiliated fighters out of their former strongholds in Yemen's southern Abyan province. And even those who deeply resent the terror network's presence appear to lack the will to directly confront the group.
"The government tells us to turn in al Qaeda fighters," one tribesman hailing from near the site of Thursday's strike mused. "But how can we do that when there's no government present to turn them into? And why would we do it when there's no government present to protect us from retaliation?"
It's going to take more than drone strikes to eliminate al Qaeda from its strongholds in this Yemeni province. The militants killed, locals say, are largely replaceable, while the tens of civilians killed over the past two years has only heightened distrust of the central government among noncombatants, pushing some young men into al Qaeda's arms.
However, the long-term solution to combatting the militants' presence -- ameliorating pervasive poverty and underdevelopment -- is far easier said than done.
Either way, in the aftermath of Thursday's strike, the possibility of defeating al Qaeda in al-Baydah feels further away than ever.
*http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2013/12/18/yemen_drone_strike_wedding#sthash.9o133IzD.dpbs
Labels:
State of the Nation
Friday, December 20, 2013
Desert Mothers...
Desert Mothers were Christian ascetics who inhabited the desert in Syria, Palestine and Egypt in the 4th and 5th centuries CE. They lived in the monastic communities or as hermits. There are several chapters dedicated to the Desert Mothers in the Lausiac History by Palladius. Amma Syncletica, a famous Desert Mother once said, "In the beginning there are a great many battles and a good deal of suffering for those who are advancing towards God and afterwards, ineffable joy. It is like those who wish to light a fire; at first they are choked by the smoke and cry, and by this means obtain what they seek ... so we must also kindle the divine fire in ourselves through tears and hard work."
Labels:
Related to Religion,
Women of the Desert
Wednesday, December 18, 2013
The Mandela Myth...
It would be nice to be able to write the following in the wake of Nelson Mandela’s demise: Mandela was a freedom fighter to the end, a figure whose legacy has not only brought justice and equality to the people he left behind, but also has worked as a moving inspiration for the world leaders who gathered last week to bid his spirit farewell.
It would be nice, but it would be a lie. A lie, I admit, in harmony with much of the overwhelmingly corporate global media about the event – the BBC World/CNN/Reuters myth-recycling machine which decides, for all of us, each day’s narratives on the planet. But it would be a lie all the same.
Whenever a hundred leaders of the world’s political elites gather together to celebrate someone, you know something is wrong. Even before hearing any of the sugared speeches, the manufactured elegies, the anodyne descriptions of Mandela as a peace-lover and beacon of hope, you knew they were going to “Martin-Luther-King” Mandela (if such a verb doesn’t exist, it should after what we saw on Tuesday).
Some of the speeches were so hypocritical they bordered on the offensive: Obama’s criticism of other African leaders for paying lip-service to Mandela whilst repressing freedom in their own countries provided the lowest-point of the evening (Manning? Snowden? Guantanamo?). British Prime Minister David Cameron’s belief that “a great light has gone out of this world” was also fascinating, given the fact that in the last year of the apartheid regime he was wined and dined in South Africa on a sanctions-busting visit.
And yet, as is often the case, it is what was unsaid during this ceremony – and the deluge of media-info accompanying it – that is more significant. What was officially left out of all of these speeches at a great man’s funeral is useful, insofar as it gives us an idea of how both the history and the future of our planet is being news-managed. Some of these ommissions are an insult to Mandela’s memory; others, sadly, are a consequence of Mandela’s own political decisions after 1990.
There are omissions which were country-specific. There was no apology from Obama for the decades-long U.S. support of the apartheid regime – and the fact that Mandela remained on the ‘terrorist watch’ list right up until 2008. At Thatcher’s funeral, both Obama and Cameron had praised her as a warrior of liberty – Cameron made no mention of Thatcher and her government’s racist support of white South Africa throughout the 70s and 80s. To hear both men speak, you would think Mandela had always been a Friend of Freedom (heavy American accent).
The bigger omission, however, is the most painful one to report. It concerns a certain lie, a certain fantasy – one which has parallels with Obama’s own “post-racial” America. When Mandela was released from jail in 1990, one of the men escorting him out of prison was Cyril Ramaphosa – a man who, twenty years down the line, would become one of South Africa’s wealthiest mining magnates. Once a trade union leader, now a billionaire, Ramaphosa stands as a bitter yet succinct icon of what happened to post-apartheid South Africa. In the classic Ousmane Sembene film Xala, the white colonial rulers are thrown out of government, to be immediately replaced by black politicians wearing the identical clothes. A similar tale could be told of Mandela’s South Africa. Sembene understood all too well that colonial independence was often a purely dermatological affair – a change of skin-colour, rather than society.
It would be wrong to blame Mandela for the triumph of neoliberal, IMF-friendly economics in South Africa . It is equally wrong, however, to pretend that such a triumph did not take place – that economic apartheid has succeeded its dermatological version – and that Mandela did enough to prevent it. In 1988, two years before the break-up of the apartheid regime, a group of international banks and corporations had helped to arrange a meeting in the UK between an ANC (in exile) and certain key members of the Afrikaaner elite. The creation of a class of black entrepreneurs in the 1980s (under the scheme of Black Economic Empowerment) was already paving the way for a capital-friendly transition from apartheid to a South Africa the world could (literally) do business with.
Once in power, the ANC quickly renounced its promise to take over the country’s banks and abandoned its ambitious Reconstruction and Development Programme, as brick by brick the vision of a new South Africa gave way to a free-market economy – one which preserved the country’s wealthiest elites, black and white, but left the rest of the country to deal with the same levels of poverty as before. By 2001, as John Pilger reports, George Soros was able to assure the Davos Economic Forum that South Africa was “in the hands of international capital”. This is the road that leads today to the $25 million dollar home of the country’s president, Jacob Zuma, whilst millions of the citizens he is supposed to represent live in abject poverty.
Mandela’s complicity in all of this explains his adulation, today, by the “international community”. It explains why his funeral attracted the same crowd as Thatcher’s, and a different universe of media coverage than Chavez’s. When figures such as the U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, or the U.S. National Security Adviser Susan Rice, praise Mandela as a beacon of freedom, it is the freedom of the free market they really praise – not the freedom of the vast majority of ordinary people. The philosophers Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri have said that the Empire of the twenty-first century will be an empire that, although built on violence, talks about nothing but peace – listening to the panoply of speeches from the world’s leaders last week, it was difficult not to think of this as Mandela’s revolutionary past was painted over by his “peace-loving”, reformatory present. A man of great personal courage and principle, his legacy will be tainted by what has happened (or failed to happen) for South Africa’s poor since his release – and by the use others have made of his image.
It is interesting how two of the most-commented incidents from the Mandela memorial service last week were the “selfies” Cameron, Obama and the Danish Prime Minister made of themselves, and the fake sign-language interpreter who stood alongside the world leaders as they spoke, making incomprehensible signs. They have aroused the most discussion because, as far as the speeches of the politicians were concerned, they were two of the most truthful moments from the memorial service – they revealed an obscene glimpse into the truth of the entire event. The fake sign-language interpreter, in particular, making signs and gestures with no meaning, provided an explicit metaphor of all the politicians he stood alongside as they spun their homilies. As Obama spoke about freedom and justice, the fraudster next to him reminded us of what we were really witnessing. Sometimes, there is a truth even in impostorship.
*http://www.politicaltheology.com/blog/the-mandela-myth-ian-almond/ (16 December 2013)
Ian Almond is Professor of World Literature at the School of Foreign Service in Qatar (Georgetown University). He is the author of four books, most recently Two Faiths, One Banner (Harvard University Press, 2009). His work has been translated into seven languages, including Arabic, Korean, Persian and Serbo-Croat.
Labels:
Further Than Fiction,
State of the Nation
Monday, December 16, 2013
Marvel Comics debuts female Muslim Superhero...
Move over Black Widow and step aside She-Hulk: Marvel Comics is introducing a new superhero - a 16-year-old Muslim-American girl named Kamala Khan, to reflect the growing diversity of its readers. The character, who will be the new Ms Marvel, lives with her conservative Pakistani parents and brother in the US state of New Jersey. She will make her debut in January and appear in a monthly series starting on February 6.
"It is so important that we tell stories that reflect the ever-changing world that we live in and being a Muslim-American is so much a part of that," said Sana Amanat, the series editor, who also worked on the Ultimate Spider-Man and Ultimate X-Men comic books.
Although the inspiration for the new series came from a desire to explore the Muslim-American experience, she said it was not about what it meant to be a Muslim, Pakistani or American.
"It is about a young girl who is figuring out who she is and what happens when these really extraordinary things happen to her," she added in an interview.
Khan is a big comic book fan and after she discovers her superhuman power - being a polymorph and able to lengthen her arms and legs and change her shape - she takes on the name of Ms Marvel. The title had previously belonged to Carol Danvers, a character Khan had always admired.
The idea for the new superhero stemmed from a casual conversation Amanat had with her senior editor, Steve Wacker, about her own experiences growing up as a Muslim-American.
"He was interested in the dilemma I faced as a young girl and the next day he came in and said, 'Wouldn't it be great to have a superhero that was for all the little girls that grew up just like you, and who are growing up just like you are today, and to create a character they can be inspired by,'" Amanat said.
The writer, G Willow Wilson, a convert to Islam, and artist Adrian Alphona are working on the project, which started about 18 months ago.
Wilson said she created the character as a true-to-life person so that people, particularly young women, could relate to her.
Khan experiences the usual teenage angst, feelings of confusion and being an outsider, dealing with the expectations of her parents and problems at high school.
"It's for all the geek girls out there, and everybody else who's ever looked at life on the fringe," Wilson said in a statement.
Khan is not the first Muslim-American character in the superhero world, which has been largely dominated by white males, but Amanat said she was being pushed to the forefront of the Marvel universe.
"People have been mostly positive about it," she said, adding that the real test would come early next year when the series began.
Labels:
Further Than Fiction,
Just for Kicks
Wednesday, December 11, 2013
The Love-Filled Street Art of Alex Senna...
Alex Senna is challenging the 'norms' of street art. His signature black and
white styled romantic murals are bound to make spray can enthusiasts
look twice. "Alex Senna brings us to a nostalgic atmosphere when using
moments and characters that sounds familiar like a friend, a moment, a
romance or an emotion.The incomparable traces of his work in black and
white allow a little more love to come inside of our daily obligations,
a universal need these days."
white styled romantic murals are bound to make spray can enthusiasts
look twice. "Alex Senna brings us to a nostalgic atmosphere when using
moments and characters that sounds familiar like a friend, a moment, a
romance or an emotion.The incomparable traces of his work in black and
white allow a little more love to come inside of our daily obligations,
a universal need these days."
Labels:
Just for Kicks
Friday, December 6, 2013
Go Well Madiba...
Labels:
Men of the Desert,
State of the Nation
Monday, December 2, 2013
Qahera...
(www.qahera.tumblr.com)
On a fine Egyptian day, a woman who walks alone in the street is harassed by a man who has been following her. “Nice curves, gorgeous,” he says, before his hand reaches for her bottom. The woman turns around, and in shock, she screams “Stop him.” Police question her story based on the fact that she’s wearing Western clothes. Cut to a woman in hijab being sexually harassed. She is Qahera, Egypt’s newest superhero and the story does not end well for the harassers.
Qahera is not your typical superhero. For starters, she is a veiled Muslim woman who helps other women in distress, most importantly, in situations involving sexual violence. She carries a sword and has amazing fighting abilities. She is also fed up with misogyny, sexual harassment and “white savior”ideologies.
Qahera is Arabic for Cairo. It also means“conqueror” or “vanquisher.”
“I named her Qahera for several reasons,” says Deena Mohamed, creator of the web comic, which shares a name with its heroine. “Chauvinism, for starters! I sort of wanted to make a reference to Egypt, but Qahera also struck me as a great name because it has so many powerful meanings: vanquisher, destroyer, omnipotent. It's a great name for a superhero, honestly, especially one who faces as many challenges as she does.”
Mohamed is a 19-year-old Egyptian student and illustrator who wanted to draw a strong female character, one whose buttons are pushed when a woman is mistreated.
In Egypt, 99 percent of women have been sexually harassed, according to U.N. Women. Combating sexual harassment and misogyny through art is one way activists are hoping to change minds and perceptions.
Qahera uses her powers to bring absent justice for women, but Mohamed also felt that she needed to establish that Qahera “was not interested in any white savior ideologies that would inevitably result from it.”
“My personal inspiration has always been my frustration with a lot of things, mainly misogyny. But the trouble is you can't critique our society without someone else trying to co-opt it and claiming they want to save you, or that you live in a backwards society,” Mohamed says.
To Mohamed, this is how Qahera was born, out of everyday challenges. She is “someone who was willing to take a stand against both the problems we have and people who try to impose their own views onto us.”
“Qahera is basically everything I long to be, and she is modelled after the countless strong women I see every day living their lives despite the challenges they face. Initially I was just hoping to reach Muslim girls who were just as frustrated about issues as I was, but it's expanded so much that I realized there is a huge gap in representation for someone like Qahera, so I can even hope to reach the people affecting those issues as well as the ones affected by it,” Mohamed says.
Mohamed uses her personal experiences as fuel for her art.
“I think my experiences definitely helped shape my views, because like nearly everyone else in Egypt I have experiences with the kind of discomfort you feel walking down the street, the hyperawareness of your clothes and your appearance, and the sort of feedback you get from people that makes you wary to complain about it,” she says. “I also drew heavily from other people's experiences (including my friends and other women who have written about their experiences) to help shape the comic. It definitely makes a difference when you know firsthand how it feels, and I think that's why so many women were able to relate to it so easily.”
“I'd like to think that Qahera is representative of a very headstrong, very fierce Egyptian woman gifted with superpowers. I haven't actually revealed the extent of her superpowers yet because I've only had the three strips that dealt mainly with issues and were too short to discuss Qahera herself or her development, but clearly she can fly! I'm actually hoping to kind of discuss Qahera's identity and her backstory in a strip soon.”
The majority of Muslim Egyptian women have adopted the Islamic attire, and despite sporadic secular criticism of the dress, it is common for the Muslim Egyptian women to identify with the veil. In fact, the hijab has been advised as a tool to avoid sexual harassment in the street. But as in Mohamed’s comic series, it doesn’t always work that way. Women who wear the hijab in Egypt are sexually harassed just as frequently and as violently as their peers without a veil. Still, Mohamed wanted her heroine to be veiled from the start.
“I knew from the start that Qahera would wear a hijab because she was initially intended to combat both Islamophobia and misogyny. Hijabi Muslim women bear the brunt of Islamophobia, especially abroad, simply because they are representative of their religion wherever they go. All the responsibilities and stereotypes of Muslims are unfairly heaped upon their heads, and if Qahera was going to make any real difference in perceptions of Muslims, I knew she had to wear a hijab. There's also the fact that there is so little representation of veiled women that empowers them instead of dehumanizing them, and I wanted to help contribute to that.”
In another bold strip, Qahera fights misogyny portrayed as an Islamic Preacher.
“A good wife is an obedient wife. It is your Islamic duty to keep your women at home and in check,” are the last words of preacher speaking to a group of wide-eyed men, moments before Qahera jumps him. He hangs injured from a clothes drying rack as she smiles and says, “house work is a woman’s work, definitely. And I really enjoy doing the laundry.”
It seems that Qahera’s bravery has hit a nerve with the comic strip’s readers.
“The reactions she received were … I'm honestly blown away by the reception. I didn't expect it to be welcomed so warmly, especially inside Egypt, and not just by young women. I think the most remarkable part of women's responses is that they haven't been limited to Muslim or Arab women, but instead I've had similar reactions from all around the world, and I think that's amazing,” says Mohamed.
Mohamed says she was especially surprised the comic was “welcomed so well by Egyptians on the Internet” who were introduced to Qahera through the issue of sexual harassment, and the idea of a female Muslim superhero.
But Mohamed admits to some mixed reactions.
“There's still definitely criticism and confusion around it, which is fully understandable because it's difficult to cater for both a global audience and a local audience, and especially with a Western concept like a 'superhero,' but I'm working on it.
“There was also a little hesitation amongst Egyptian women who interpreted the comic to advocate modesty as a solution to sexual harassment, although I was trying to convey the opposite. Overall though, I think the reception has been beyond anything I could have expected, and indicative of a desire for change and a desire for someone like Qahera to exist.”
http://www.thedailybeast.com/witw/articles/2013/09/22/meet-qahera-egypt-s-hijab-wearing-comic-superheroine.html
Labels:
Related to Religion,
Women of the Desert
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