On a mission: Maryam Alkhawaja wants to tell you about oppression in Bahrain

Beirut, Lebanon (CNN) -- Inside a half-empty lecture hall at the American University of Beirut, Maryam Alkhawaja explains her cause.

"The thing about Bahrain is that nobody really knows what's going on there because there's not much media coverage," Alkhawaja said during a recent visit. "But the protests never stopped."

At just 26, the young woman is already one of her country's most outspoken rights activists, and she's on a mission: to make sure "that people across the world, not just the Arab world, across the world, are hearing about what's going on the ground."

To carry out that mission, Alkhawaja -- who has dual Bahraini and Danish citizenship, and is the acting president of the Bahrain Center for Human Rights -- lives in exile and travels the world explaining how her people are oppressed.

Back in the auditorium, her audience is small, but extremely attentive.

"Every single day," Alkhawaja says, "between 15 to 25 different areas come out to protest in Bahrain. Every single day."

Those demonstrations began in February 2011, at the height of the Arab Spring. Bahraini citizens, spurred by successful uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt, demanded democratic reforms and other changes in the way the country was run.

Anger from the majority Shiite population was directed at the ruling Sunni minority.

But Bahrain's uprising failed to gain the traction of other regional revolutions after a crackdown by authorities in the tiny island state, backed by troops from nearby Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.

Demonstrators say authorities killed dozens of people and arrested, tortured and imprisoned hundreds of others. Opposition leaders have tried to keep the protest movement alive.

For Alkhawaja, the cause continues. She says her countrymen and women will not be silenced, despite the odds they face.

"When you're talking about human rights, it's black and white," she says. "There's no excuse for committing human rights violations."

Alkhawaja accuses Bahrain's government of committing violations on a daily basis, and says her organization exists in part to document those abuses.

The government denies the claims, saying it has implemented tough penalties for those who incite what it calls "terrorism."

In a statement, the Bahraini government says it has implemented reforms and set up independent bodies to address grievances.

"We would also like to make it very clear that Ms. Al-Khawaja's personal misguided view that 'Bahraini citizens are oppressed' is not representative of the broad consensus, nor of the opposition front," the statement said.

The government also acknowledged the country's "challenging past" and said remedies are under way.

"Since the release of the Bahrain Independent Commission of Inquiry (BICI) report in 2011, Bahrain has made a commitment to address all grievances, as well as well reform the institutional landscape to ensure historical errors are not repeated. In regards to grievances pertaining to any accusation of mistreatment, independent bodies have been established to investigate and address any incident of misconduct that may undermine public confidence in the Ministry of Interior (MOI), even if no formal complaint is filed."

Read full government statement

This kind of sparring is nothing new to Alkhawaja, who was literally born into this line of work.

She comes from a well-known family of dissidents. Her father, Abdulhadi Alkhawaja, was sentenced to life in prison for his role in anti-government demonstrations and plotting to overthrow the country's royal family. Many rights groups have called him a prisoner of conscience.

Her sister, Zainab Alkhawaja, is also a very prominent rights activist, and also currently locked up -- having been sentenced to prison for, among other things, insulting the police.

It can all get to be too much, which is why Alkhawaja says she has to detach.

"Part of doing this work is teaching yourself to depersonalize all of the cases that you deal with," she explains. "When I talk about Abdulhadi Alkhawaja the political prisoner and the torture victim, or the torture survivor, I don't talk about Abdulhadi Alkhawaja, my father, who I shared my childhood with -- I talk about Abdulhadi Alkhawaja, the person who is known to Bahrain and is known to the cause."

"When I talk about Zainab Alkhawaja, you know, being separated from her three-year-old child, I'm not talking about my sister and my niece," adds Alkhawaja. "I'm talking about Zainab Alkhawaja the Bahraini citizen."

Over the past two years, Alkhawaja has become somewhat of a celebrity in the world of human rights activism, and not just in Bahrain.

Regularly invited to conferences around the world, she finds her platform growing every day -- with more than 94,000 Twitter followers. She was even named one of Foreign Policy Magazine's Top 100 Global Thinkers in 2012.

She seems happy to address anyone willing to listen. Still, she says, it's never easy.

"The thing with being a human rights defender is that it's always accompanied with guilt because no matter what you do, you feel you're not doing enough."

Which is why Alkhawaja is always connected -- either online or on her phone, no matter where she goes -- reviewing claims, making cases, tweeting updates.

She was in Lebanon for only a few days, but never stopped addressing audiences both digital and physical, large and small, urging the world to listen to the stories of the oppressed, one voice at a time.

http://www.cnn.com/2013/08/25/world/meast/bahrain-human-rights-activist/index.html?sr=sharebar_twitter

Our Hearts Are With The Syrian People...Because the US War Machine Hates Competition!

All The Good Men Are Dead...

On Egypt’s Class-Struggle: Rabias of the World Unite

“Lord! You know well that my keen desire is to carry out Your commandments and to serve Thee with all my heart, O light of my eyes. If I were free I would pass the whole day and night in prayers. But what should I do when you have made me a slave of a human being?”

These were the words of the female Muslim mystic and poet, Rabia Al-Adawiya. Her journey from slavery to freedom served as a generational testament of the resolve of the individual who was armed with faith and nothing else.

Rabia’s story is multifarious, and despite the fact that the Muslim saint died over 12 centuries ago, few Egyptians are failing to see the centrality of her narrative to their own. In the north of the Nasr City district, tens of thousands of Egyptians chose the iconic mosque named after her to stage their sit-in and demanded the return to shar’iya (legitimacy) after it was seized in a brazen military coup which ousted elected President Mohammed Morsi on July 03.

Rabia’s narrative is essential because it was about freedom. She was born into a very poor family in Basra, Iraq. According to Farid ud-Din Attar who related her story, she was so poor that when she was born the family had nothing to wrap around her, not even oil to light their only lamp. Years later when Rabia was a grownup, she was kidnapped and sold into Egyptian slavery as she tried to escape a deadly famine in Iraq.

Rabia didn’t exactly challenge her master through organizing strikes and defiant sit-ins. She was alone and dominated by too many powerful forces that made her life of slavery and degradation absolute. So she spent most of the day as a slave, but late at night she would stay up and pray. It was more than praying, but an attempt at reclaiming her humanity, at comprehending the multitude of forces that chained her to earthly relations of slave and master, and in a sense, she tried to discover a level of freedom that could not be granted by a master’s wish.

In fact, her true ‘miracle’ was that of her faith under the harshest possible conditions, and her ability to strive for freedom while practically speaking, she remained a slave. It is as if this female poet, a heroin and a saint by the standards of many poor, downtrodden people, managed to redefine the relationship of the ongoing class struggle, and found freedom within herself. It is believed that her inconceivable faith was so strong that her master could not deal with the guilt of holding a saint a slave. So, she was freed.

Regardless of the precision of the details, Rabia Al-Adawiya’s legacy has passed on from one generation of Egyptians to the next. Like her, many of these Egyptians are mostly poor, immensely patient, and are hostage to the same century-old class struggle by which Rabia was defined.

In some way, the January 25 revolution included millions of Rabias fed up with oppression and servitude. But the class division that was highlighted after millions of Egyptians rose against the military coup became clearer than ever. These were the poorest of the poor, long alienated and dehumanized by both the ruling class and the conceited, intellectual groupings of self-described liberals and socialists. The unprecedented union between Egypt’s ruling class and anti-Muslim intellectual elite succeeded, to an extent, in blocking our view from the substantial class struggle underway in Egypt, where the poorest communities – yes, workers and peasants – were leading a historic struggle to reclaim democracy from the upper and middle class intellectuals. The former committed hideous murders against peaceful protesters, while the latter group found a way to explain why it was completely fine to mow down thousands of people staging massive sit-ins in Nahda Square, and yes, Rabia Al-Adawiya Square, named after Rabi.

The Rabias of Egypt are not hated, they are loathed. They have always been treated as sub-humans that live in their own dirty quarters which are unbelievably neglected shantytowns made up of haggard buildings stacked atop one another.  The Rabias of Egypt struggle to merely survive on a daily basis.

Faith serves the poor more than it serves the rich, so they have their mosques. It is a last escape against the harsh grinds of life. When the January 25 revolution erupted, a temporary union existed between the poor and the disenchanted middle class, as they had access to local and international media forums, and were disproportionately represented in their access to social media.

But when the first vote following the removal of Hosni Mubarak was held on March 19, 2011, all the way until the presidential runoff elections on June 16, 2012, the discrepancies began showing: Egypt’s poor seemed to have a whole different world of political preferences, favoring religious parties that spoke their language, over the liberals, socialists and all the rest. The loudest liberals and socialists seemed to appear on television, but as several rounds of voting had shown, they were the less relevant among Egyptians. The trend was unmistakable, Egypt sought a political program that was democratic and positioned with a religious discourse.

Liberals and socialists were once more alienated, this time democratically. Their own interpretation of a western-like democracy was in reality neither western-like nor democratic, and their combined numbers placed them at the bottom of the ladder of political relevance. They blamed everyone for their failings, initially the military, the remnants of the regime, and eventually the Muslim Brotherhood.

Previous Egyptian regimes had invested precocious resources to demonize any Egyptian Muslim with a political preference that didn’t venerate the regime. They demonized the Islamists in ways that reduced them to the level of sub-humans in the eyes of the ruling class. Many of the liberal and socialist forces that took part in the Jan 25 revolution grew up knowing no other discourse except seeing political Islam as evil that must be defeated. That discourse was strengthened after the signing of the Camp David Accords in the late 1970’s, for Israel was no longer the enemy, and the enemy were those who dared protest Egypt’s pro-US and pro-Israel policies.

Culture doesn’t change overnight. Collective thinking is not switched off and on with the press of a button. The fact is that the dominance of the Islamic narrative in post-revolution Egypt terrified those who became accustomed to the marginalization of political Islam. It was to the extent that the temporary alliance between the poor and the middle class was done with, in favor of a sinister alliance with the forces allied with the last regime, including the military. The combination was deadlier than any other time in Egypt’s modern history. Thousands of people fell dead and wounded in a few hours on August 14 starting with a crackdown on Rabia Al-Adawiya’s Square. The mosque was set ablaze. The depravity of the violence that followed, hailed by liberals and socialists, as well as regime supporters as a victory for democracy, is indescribable.

But as bloody and heart-wrenching as the last few days in Egypt have been, a sense of clarity finally prevailed. The Jan 25 revolution, inspiring as it was, left numerous questions unanswered, and presented the military with the opportunity to break away from the Mubaraks and re-brand itself as the protector of the nation. But real democracy proved too much for the military and the layers of corrupt political and economic elites it represents. Now, the rosy image of a peaceful revolution guided by its military to achieve a better tomorrow is over: the masks have all been lifted and the reality is much uglier than previously thought. Egypt’s real struggle for freedom and political definition is just starting.

Rabia’s 12- centuries- old legacy will not vanish even after the mosque was burnt. Many of the dead were witnessed and filmed raising their forefingers to heaven in one last prayer as they let go of their last breath. The images from Egypt were gory to say the least, but the faith of Egyptians remains strong.

- Ramzy Baroud (www.ramzybaroud.net) is an internationally-syndicated columnist and the editor of PalestineChronicle.com. His latest book is: My Father was A Freedom Fighter: Gaza’s Untold Story (Pluto Press).

Farewell...

 At a certain point I lost track of you.
 They make a desolation and call it peace.
 when you left even the stones were buried:
 the defenceless would have no weapons.

 When the ibex rubs itself against the rocks,
 who collects its fallen fleece from the slopes?
 O Weaver whose seams perfectly vanished,
 who weighs the hairs on the jeweller's balance?
 They make a desolation and call it peace.
 Who is the guardian tonight of the Gates of Paradise?

 My memory is again in the way of your history.
 Army convoys all night like desert caravans:
 In the smoking oil of dimmed headlights, time dissolved- all
 winter- its crushed fennel.
 We can't ask them: Are you done with the world?

 In the lake the arms of temples and mosques are locked in each other's
 reflections.

 Have you soaked saffron to pour on them when they are found like this
 centuries later in this country
 I have stitched to your shadow?

 In this country we step out with doors in our arms
 Children run out with windows in their arms.
 You drag it behind you in lit corridors.
 if the switch is pulled you will be torn from everything.

 At a certain point I lost track of you.
 You needed me. You needed to perfect me.
 In your absence you polished me into the Enemy.
 Your history gets in the way of my memory.
 I am everything you lost. You can't forgive me.
 I am everything you lost. Your perfect Enemy.
 Your memory gets in the way of my memory:

 I am being rowed through Paradise in a river of Hell:
 Exquisite ghost, it is night.

 The paddle is a heart; it breaks the porcelain waves.
 It is still night. The paddle is a lotus.
 I am rowed- as it withers-toward the breeze which is soft as
 if it had pity on me.

 If only somehow you could have been mine, what wouldn't
 have happened in the world?

 I'm everything you lost. You won't forgive me.
 My memory keeps getting in the way of your history.
 There is nothing to forgive.You can't forgive me.
 I hid my pain even from myself; 

 I revealed my pain only to myself.

 There is everything to forgive. You can't forgive me.

 If only somehow you could have been mine,
 what would not have been possible in the world?

-- Agha Shahid Ali

Eid Mubarak...

(Photo: http://latimesphoto.files.wordpress.com/2011/08)

This Eid let us vow to continue with the spirit of... 

Solidarity, 

Sacrifice,

   

Sinceirity &

Sabr 

epitomised by Ramadan. 

The Great Nations...

There are the Great, America and Russia,
And the small, never spelled out.

There are nations where water flows,
And others dreaming of their own share of the world,
There are the talkers, pushing their agendas
And those seeking to escape.

There are Indian and the Tuareg,
The Pygmies and the children with cholera.

There is peace and rage, constantly boiling
In a pot, a stew of misery,
In it are the guts of the discontent,
The people abandoned by those who call themselves Great.

There is this little country surrounded by a desert landscape,
All it shows for itself is oil flowing from a rock
A spring of living water to quench the thirst
Lasting for many moons,
it does not compete with the Great Nations
And their satanic pride.

The Great grow Greater
The small again become even smaller,
We need a third way, the chance to reconsider the status quo,
Such as the UN, but with more freedom,
And greater justice in the Hague that considers
The statements of those oppressed in their thousands.

-Souéloum Diagho

Who Owns Jesus?

Part of Dow’s successful argument was couched in the logic that if Jesus, a Middle Easterner, was white, it only followed that George Dow, also from the Middle East, was white too. It was notions of Jesus’ whiteness—in a largely white Christian American culture—that ultimately won the case for Dow. White Christians owned Jesus and the right to call him theirs, and they were unable to let him go.

Every 10 years, millions of Middle Easterners in the U.S. turn to their census forms and check the box under race labeled “white.” This is, after all, their legal classification. The U.S. government formally recognizes anyone from “Europe, the Middle East or North Africa” as white.

This seems counterintuitive, but it’s the product of several contentious court battles that occurred in the early 1900s. The most prominent of these was Dow v. United States, a 1915 case in which Syrian immigrant George Dow fought to overturn two lower court decisions that found him ineligible for naturalization because he wasn’t white. A federal appeals court ruled in Dow’s favor. And he won because of Jesus.

Perhaps popular perceptions of Jesus have not changed since then, as evidenced by the extremely uncomfortable Fox News interview with Reza Aslan—a religious scholar and professor at UC Riverside—that has gone viral since it was posted July 26. Aslan is the author of “Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth,” which has been the center of some controversy at Fox News, but not for anything that’s in the book. The point of contention for Lauren Green, host of the FoxNews.com program “Spirited Debate,” and Fox News guest writer and Christian pastor John S. Dickerson is the author himself, who is Muslim.

“I want to be clear, you are a Muslim,” Green began the interview. “So why did you write a book about the founder of Christianity?”

In a manner befitting that of an elementary school teacher, Aslan carefully explained to Green that he was a scholar who’s devoted much of his academic career to the history of religions. His own religion was inconsequential.

“Well, to be clear,” replied Aslan, “I am a scholar of religions with four degrees, including one in the New Testament, and fluency in biblical Greek, who has been studying the origins of Christianity for two decades, who also just happens to be a Muslim.”

But Green’s line of questioning did not let up, and she continued to prod Aslan’s motives for writing the book, even quoting from the Dickerson Fox News op-ed piece that purported to “out” Aslan as a Muslim. Aslan, clearly unsurprised by her persistence, informed her patiently that he’s never tried to hide the fact that he’s Muslim—it’s something he states quite clearly on the second page of his new book.

This went on for almost 10 minutes, making it clear that this wasn’t an interview. It was an interrogation. In Dickerson’s op-ed and in Green’s interview, it was not Aslan’s book that was being put on trial, but Aslan himself.

“But it still begs the question,” Green persisted in the interview, “why would you be interested in the founder of Christianity?”

The insinuation underlying Green’s questions was that a Muslim writing about Jesus was not just outlandish, but inconceivable without some kind of hidden agenda. Aslan’s religion nullified his scholarly objectivity. Throughout the interview, Aslan appeared unfazed, perhaps because this has come to be the modus operandi of Fox News hosts, or perhaps because Aslan, like many Muslims, faces this kind of suspicion in his everyday life—by policemen, TSA officers and passers-by who find his dark skin and foreign name threatening.

But what’s really revealing about Green’s interview is what it exposed about how Jesus exists in the popular Christian imagination—not just white, but exclusively Christian. Green overlooked the fact that Jesus appears in Islamic theology as one of the great prophets of God, one of the few prophets mentioned by name in the Quran. He’s highly revered among Muslims, who acknowledge Jesus as the founder of Christianity, and Christianity as a precursor to Islam. But Green and Dickerson both ignored these facts—something that could have made for a better interview discussion—and chose instead to attempt to implicate Aslan in some grand conspiracy against Christianity itself. 

Despite Aslan’s academic distinctions, Fox News will view him only as a Muslim writing about Jesus. But what Aslan tried to get across to Green was that he was just an interested scholar writing about a man who 2,000 years after his death, plays a role in the lives of billions of people around the world. Ultimately, however, Aslan has no right to Jesus’ story. As far as Fox News—and much of white, Christian America—is concerned, Jesus’ whiteness is fact, and Aslan, no matter what box he checks on his census form, will never be white. 

Tasbeeh Herwees is a freelance writer and producer in Los Angeles. She is also the co-founder of Kifah Libya, an independent, online magazine about Libyan political, social and cultural affairs. (http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/who_owns_jesus_20130801/)

Sensationalist, Orientalist Bullshit...

Post 9/11 the most dreadful dreadful works of fiction have been churned out en masse to feed the paranoia that Islam, the Quran, Muslims, Arabs specifically and people of colour in general are a threat to modern civilisation and Craig Thompson's "Habibi" is no exception.

It’s a crass, sacrilegious and pathetic attempt at a graphic novel that lacks any real depth or purpose. 

Thompson admits that it is a "conscious mash-up between the sacred holy books and the trashy comic books" and hopes that by taking responsibility for his deliberate orientalism, he will fool the reader into thinking that the book addresses serious issues in a satirical sense.  Far from a love story, his sleazy book is filled with the hatred, disrespect and intolerance which has become acceptable only when Islam is the target.

In sadistic voyeurism, Thompson portrays his lead character, Dodola, as a victim of sexual abuse throughout the "fairytale". In a blunt attempt at feminism, he repeats the mistakes of "liberal" westerners who believe that the sexualisation and eroticization of women's bodies is the only way that women can be empowered. 90% of the graphic novel is a display of Dodola's nudity - whether she is being raped, selling her body, bathing, indulging in orgies, or giving birth. Thompson defends this by claiming that the exoticisation, eroticisation and stereotypes are deliberate tactics he has used to make readers examine the male guilt.

In contradiction to his claimed goal of addressing the post 9/11 guilt of America's Islamophobic reaction, he reinforces Islamophobia in the most obtrusive manner, by beginning his story with the classic notion that Middle Eastern society is patriarchal and fathers would gladly sell their nine year old daughters as child brides. This is a raw stab at the notion that the Prophet Muhammed (SAW) married his youngest wife, Ayesha, when she was nine. 

How unimaginative to "create" a place named "Wanatolia" - I suppose all it took for Thompson was to discover the letter "W" and append it artificially to Anatolia, the Turkish region. 

The descriptions of the fictitious setting make me think that Thompson was high on LSD while watching Disney's Aladdin when he masterminded this muddled vortex of modern and ancient worlds, with scenes of camel caravans juxtaposed with high-rise buildings and oil rigs, displaying arabised signs for Pepsi, Coca Cola and Burger king.

It is in a city street, not unlike 5th avenue, New York that Dodola observes fashionable "white" women sporting short skirts, killer heels and designer bags. This must be what liberation is all about because it prompts her to shed her hijab in a desperate attempt to mirror their lifestyles and in symbolic rejection of backwardness and control. The casting off of the hijab, as most neo-orientalists believe, equates to empowerment and the embracing of the western notion of freedom, while rejecting patriarchy. This follows Thomson's depiction of Muslim women covered up in public while engaging in harem orgies behind palace walls - a place he claims is meant to represent George Bush's White House and all of the developed world oblivious to the real poverty that surrounds them. 

Thompson has created nothing more than pornography garnished with calligraphy resulting in even more of the sensationalist bullshit that passes for literature and art these days.

His more sophisticated use of the ‘successful’ recipe of the Danish cartoon saga to incite anger and hatred is a mis-education to those who know little about the religion. 

Without much Islamic knowledge, Thompson claims to have spent years trying to learn about Islam just to be able to pen this novel. He has seemingly spent time practicing calligraphy in Arabic script to incorporate into the book. This has not been to learn the language but simply to stylize the novel with ornate curves and geometric shapes - because, as it would appear in his mind, this is all Arabic is worth - meaningless apart from it's aesthetic design. He picks from orientalist art and garbled calligraphy to illustrate passages of the Holy Quran in a bid to combine religion with art.

Coming from a strong evangelical background, he not only denigrates Quranic anecdotes but also biblical verses and ahadith, claiming that the use of these texts is meant to demonstrate that they are not at odds with one another. He achieves quite the opposite as he continues to vilify Islam and Muslims in the novel's graphic sequence of the savagery of the Arabs.

He takes it a step further by not only insulting the prophetic stories from both the Bible and the Quran, but has the audacity to insult Muslims and Islam in far more daring way, by carelessly placing the quranic verses as decorative imagery to his pornographic scenes, claiming this to be a necessary part of his storyline. This manipulation of the purity of Allah’s revelation is pure blasphemy and is far worse in my view than the insults to the Prophet Muhammed (SAW) when drawn as a cartoon.

Thompson appears to have thought that by veiling the depiction of the Prophet as early Islamic artists had done, he would avoid controversy and feign respect. He has however, gone beyond insulting the Prophet by insulting the word of Allah.

I am shocked that there were no protests and I am embarrassed by the Muslims and apologists who have reviewed the book positively or with very limited criticism.

I have nothing but disgust for this book.