Stifling this conversation can have deadly consequences
By Mona Eltahawy
(Slightly shorter version appears in Monday's Toronto Globe and Mail)
Sex has ruffled many in the Arab world lately. About time.
Just this past week, Saudi Arabia shut down all local operations of a Lebanese TV station that broadcast an interview with a Saudi man who spoke frankly about sex.
When Mazen Abdul-Jawad, 32 and a divorced father of four, took Lebanon's LBC into his bedroom to boast that “everything happens in this room,” show his sex toys, explain that he lost his virginity at the age of 14 to a neighbour, and then host a sex chat with male friends, he was providing the sensational material that has made the show Bold Red Line notorious.
But this is ultra-conservative Saudi Arabia, where the morality police can detain a man and a woman out in public unless the two can prove they're related. And yet there was Mr. Abdul-Jawad explaining how he hooks up with women by using the Bluetooth technology on his phone.
To add insult to injury, Saudi Prince Al-Waleed Bin Talal controls the TV station which broadcast Abdul-Jawad’s interview and which a spokesman for the Culture and Information Ministry said had damaged the kingdom’s reputation. Confused?
It gets worse when you understand that the same Prince Al-Waleed also owns a religious TV station which caters to the conservative views Saudi Arabia is more often associated with as well as a music television channel that promotes racier fare, including scantily-clad singers and anchorwomen hired to attract viewers and advertising revenues.
Sex sells after all. But Abdul-Jawad has been vilified and has begged in media interviews for forgiveness from Saudi society for appearing on the show which he claims manipulated and duped him. He could face a flogging sentence
Abdul-Jawad’s “sex confessions” have only told the Arab world what it already knows: deny it all you like and threaten to punish it but unmarried men and women, as everywhere, are having sex.
If they didn’t already know that, why are there at least 1,000 virginity tests requested every year in Jordan according to Dr. Moemen al-Hadidi, chairman of the National Forensic Center? Jordanian women’s rights groups insist that men too undergo chastity tests - and for good reason. Jordanian parliament refuses to pass legislation to toughen sentences for so-called honor crimes in which Muslim and Christian men murder women relatives they suspect of suspicious behavior.
So who is talking about sex openly in the Arab world? Women.
Not surprising considering that it is women who suffer the most from double standards around sexuality in the region. Women must also face Islamists' attempts to silence the relatively relaxed attitudes toward married sex in the Koran and the sayings of the Prophet Mohammed that stress sexual pleasure for both husbands and wives.
Wedad Lootah, marriage counsellor in the family guidance department of Dubai Courts in the United Arab Emirates, and Heba Kotb, an Egyptian sex therapist, are proponents of such a message.
Ms. Lootah, who covers her entire body including her face, is the author of Top Secret: Sexual Guidance for Married Couples , published earlier this year. Ms. Kotb, who wears a head scarf, is the host of a popular sex show broadcast widely across the Arab world.
Both women have received threats and condemnations, but they can continue their work because their conservative style of dress and their message, firmly based in Islamic teachings, give them permission and legitimacy.
But what of those who are having sex outside marriage? Who lie outside the box of husband-and-wife sex promoted by Ms. Lootah and Ms. Kotb, and who want to have a more constructive conversations about sex than shows like Bold Red Line allow?
They go online, where for the past few years young Arabs especially have migrated to express themselves in unprecedented ways. More than half of Saudi bloggers are women and they know that what is banned in the “real world” can find a place in the virtual one.
Consider the Arabic-language novel Al Akheroon ( The Others ), written under the pen name Siba al-Harz – a semi-autobiographical novel in the voice of a Shia lesbian Saudi woman. Banned in Saudi Arabia (I bought my copy in Beirut) it is available as a PDF online. Also online, you can read blogs by anonymous lesbian and gay Arabs and find support groups offering help for a minority fighting both religious and social discrimination.
Syrian writer Salwa Al-Neimi draws on the Arab world's history of sexual frankness in her novel which has became one of the best-selling books translated into English under the title “The Proof of the Honey”. It was banned in most Arab capitals but there’s no denying the classical texts she refers to such as “The Perfumed Garden”, a kind of Muslim “Kama Sutra”, by Sheikh Nefwazi. I first came across it on the shelves of the librarary at the university I attended in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. An English translaton by Sir Richard Burton is available online.
As Arab economies tumble along with the global recession, the age at which people can afford to marry is getting higher. Religion might teach chastity, but the reality is otherwise, and unless we talk about sex in the Arab world more, the pitiful sex education on offer in most countries will continue to fail young people, especially women who pay the highest price for silence.
The Arab world cannot afford to stifle the conversation about sex. Arabs are just as vulnerable to sexually transmitted diseases and HIV-AIDS and we owe it to ourselves to move sex talk beyond sensationalism and conservatism. Denial is deadly.
Mona Eltahawy is an Egyptian-born columnist and public speaker on Arab and Muslim issues.
International Herald Tribune Aug. 15, 2009
July, hot and usually slow for many of us, was a month of humiliation and pain for 164 Muslim women sentenced to a public flogging for “crimes” as varied and absurd as wearing trousers in public to having sex outside of marriage in countries as far afield as the Maldives, Sudan and Malaysia,
The most famous of those 164 is Lubna Hussein, a Sudanese journalist who was among 13 women arrested by police at a Khartoum café on July 3 and charged with violating the country’s “decency laws” by wearing trousers.
Ten of those women accepted a fine and flogging but Ms. Hussein and two others contested the charges, which they’re now fighting in court. The Sudanese regime barred her from traveling to Lebanon earlier this week to give a television interview on her trial, which resumes on Sept. 7.
It’s bizarre to use the word “lucky” to describe a woman facing 40 lashes for wearing trousers, but by virtue of her position and clout, that’s exactly what Ms. Hussein is. She is also brave and defiant: Ms. Hussein resigned her position as press officer for the United Nations, which could have earned her immunity from the charges, to stand trial.
And most importantly she is a Muslim woman who knows that a flogging for wearing trousers is sheer and utter nonsense; she has said she was ready to “receive (even) 40,000 lashes” if that’s what it takes to abolish the law.
Not so lucky have been the thousands of other Sudanese women — Muslim and non-Muslim southern Sudanese women. They have served as the whipping girls for the Sudanese regime’s cheap game of flogging women to show off its “Islamic principles.”
The International Criminal Court has indicted President Omar Hassan al-Bashir of Sudan for war crimes and crimes against humanity in Darfur. His janjaweed allies in Darfur have been accused of rape. Trousers are “indecent” but rape is just another reminder of how useful women’s bodies are in conveying the message.
Mr. Bashir is an unabashed dictator. How then to explain the silence of the Maldives’ liberally-inclined President Mohamed Nasheed at the flogging sentences handed out to 150 of his countrywomen in July for extramarital sex?
It’s depressingly simple. To appease Islamists he needs for his ruling coalition, he offers up the easiest chips to bargain with — women. Ruling according to “Islamic law,” courts in the Maldives sentenced about 50 men along with those 150 women to flogging.
Why is the ratio of women-to-men to be flogged 3-to-1? Men can escape a flogging for extramarital sex just by denying the charges. Women who become pregnant after the sex find their babies used as evidence against them. According to official statistics from the Department of Judicial Administration, the Maldives sentenced a total of 184 people to flogging in 2006 — 146 were women.
Claims that courts in the Maldives rule according to “Islamic law” are hollow at best and at worst a moral offense to the justice and compassion that we are taught are central pillars of Islam. The Maldives no longer cuts off the hands of thieves. Instead, it pours its zeal for “Islamic law” into flogging, a punishment that seems to be designed to torment mostly women.
If you want to know what a public flogging is like, search online for a video showing the Talban flogging a screaming woman in Pakistan’s Swat Valley.
For the faint of heart, there is Amnesty International’s description from the Maldives of the public flogging of an 18-year-old woman on July 5. She received 100 lashes after being accused of having sex with two men outside of marriage. Local journalists reported the woman fainted after receiving the lashes. The court ruled the woman’s pregnancy was proof of her guilt; the men involved in the case were acquitted, Amnesty said.
Also on July 5, an “Islamic court” in Malaysia sentenced a Muslim woman to be flogged with a rattan cane for having a beer with her husband in a nightclub.
As Zainah Anwar, a Muslim Malaysian feminist who is project director of Musawah, the global movement for justice and equality in the Muslim family, reminded her country’s authorities, “Neither the Koran nor the Hadith [sayings of Prophet Muhammad] prescribes any form of punishment for drinking alcohol ... Islamic teachings emphasize forgiveness, compassion and positive personal transformation. So why punish in the first instance?”
Flogging is a cruel and inhuman punishment that is banned by international law and conventions like the one against torture, to which the majority of countries in the world are signatories.
It is time for the international community to take away the pass to the international club from countries that duck out of their international obligations under the pretext of “cultural or religious” reservations.
One hundred and sixty-four women were sentenced to flogging in July alone. Where is the outrage?
Mona Eltahawy is an Egyptian-born commentator on Arab and Muslim issues.
The Sounds of Silence on IranBy Mona Eltahawy The Washington Post
Thursday, June 25, 2009 followed with my Comment.
Do you hear the silence from the Arab world over events in Iran?
Let's start with Arab leaders, who are experts at vote rigging -- if they hold elections at all. What could they possibly say about the Iranian election, or the allegations of vote fraud, without sounding hypocritical? Nor would they rush to congratulate longtime nemesis Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the leader of a regional rival with nuclear ambitions.
The Arabs are quiet, but their silence is surely tempered with discomfort. The demographics of most Arab nations mirror those of Iran: The majority of Arabs are young. It's likely that many young Arabs watching thousands of Iranians demanding to be heard, Arabs who are suffocating under dictators of their own, thought, "That's me."
For some, the silence is the sound of despair, for in Iran we are seeing the implosion of the politics of cutting off our nose to spite our face.
Let's look at the Arab world's legacy: A succession of Arab leaders were known simply for standing up to America and Israel. It did not matter what they did to their own people, the human rights violations, the mass graves, the stifling of the media and most forms of expression. Standing up to the United States and Israel was enough.
In that sense, Ahmadinejad is a familiar figure. And Saddam Hussein is gone. Libya's Moammar Gaddafi has gone from U.S. foe to friend. The region is full of U.S.-supported dictators, from President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt to the kings of Jordan and Saudi Arabia.
Standing up to America and Israel fell to non-state entities such as Hamas and Hezbollah, and their money trail leads to Iran. Ahmadinejad is simply the latest leader whom Arabs have lionized and forgiven for cutting off our nose to spite our face.
Little did the repressions visited upon Iranians matter, even though the hardships they endured were often mirrored in Arab cities cheering on Ahmadinejad. Iran supported the Palestinians, and Ahmadinejad regularly railed at the United States and threatened Israel.
But with thousands in Ahmadinejad's own country filling the streets, effectively saying that it's not enough to simply stand up to America and Israel, what now for those Arabs who lionize Ahmadinejad? Especially now that George W. Bush is gone? Where is the sympathy or support for the plight of the Iranians?
Silence.
That silence is the sound of hearts breaking over the dream of political Islam. When the 1979 revolution swept away the U.S.-backed shah and his injustices, Iran held out the tantalizing mirage of rule by Islam, even for countries that were not majority Shiite. Thirty years later, Iranians are protesting not a secular, U.S.-backed dictator but a system run by clerics who claim to uphold democracy as long as its candidates are given the regime's stamp of approval.
What's happening in Iran is not about the United States or Israel. It's not about Ahmadinejad or Mir Hossein Mousavi. It's not even about the poor or the rich in Iran. The demonstrations are about people who feel their will and voice have been disregarded. In Egypt, it's our secular dictator, in power for almost 28 years, who disregards our will. In Iran, it's a clerical regime in power for 30 years, hiding behind God.
Dictatorship by clerics is not more acceptable because its torture and beatings are committed in the name of God.
This must be especially difficult for political Islamic organizations such as the Muslim Brotherhood, which congratulated Ahmadinejad on his "victory" and yet whose generational disagreements and divisions mirror those in Iran: A young generation of Muslim brothers and sisters has over the past few years challenged the Brotherhood's aging leadership on issues such as prohibiting female and Christian leaders.
That aging leadership gave the young Muslims the very undemocratic choice of shutting up or leaving.
How do we know? The same way we've known about much of Iran's strife -- through blogs and social networking Web sites such as Facebook and Twitter. These days, most of the noise in the Arab world is online.
Online, you will hear bloggers connecting repression in Iran and Arab countries. Egyptian blogger Wael Abbas, known for exposing police brutality on YouTube, was quick to send Twitter alerts that Iran's clerics, like the Mubarak regime, used plainclothes thugs to terrorize demonstrators. Online, you will hear young Arabs express envy over the huge Iranian demonstrations in the face of government crackdowns. Online, Arabs will expose U.S. hypocrisy and ask what happened to U.S. support for peaceful demonstrators when they were beaten and dragged off Cairo streets in 2005 and 2006.
Online, Arabs argue over the politics of cutting off our nose to spite our face, challenging each other to support Iranian democrats despite Ahmadinejad's taunts at America and Israel.
Tired of the Arab world's embarrassing silence over Iran? Go online. Iranian blogs are older and more established than many in the Arab world, but the Web is giving voice to the voiceless and shattering the silence.
Mona Eltahawy, an Egyptian-born commentator based in New York, writes and lectures on Arab and Muslim issues. She received the European Commission's 2009 Samir Kassir Prize for Freedom of the Press for opinion writing.
My Comment:Interesting Note and Interesting Comments, But I am not sure that the Problem is Silence, Most times it is the Growing Gap between what they say and What they do.
And as a Computer Specialist I can tell you that If a Person has a Pre-conceived Idea the Media and Internet will not change it. Example if you think USA is Bad then you will ignore any information that proves the contrary.
I could give more Examples but Mona understands MY Silence....
אורי קואל
