
‘Mother’,
Rehana Sultana wrote, ‘you hate me, because even though
I
was born in your lap, I am that ‘cursed Miya’.’
-------
Sadaf
Jaffer, From NJ Mayor to Congress: Muslim Women Targets of Hate
Saudi
Ministry of Justice Announces Notary Public Vacancies for Women
Women
Taking Photos Of Themselves Without Headscarves Face 10-Year Prison Sentence In
Iran
The
Curious Reaction to a Niqab-Wearing Homophobe
The
Overlooked Wisdom of Arab Women Journalists in the Middle East
Pakistan
HR Minister Plans To Expand ‘Women Police Station’ In Rural Areas
Leila
Hosseinzadeh, Tehran U Student Activist, Taken To Evin Prison
Compiled
by New Age Islam News Bureau
URL: http://newageislam.com/islam,-women-and-feminism/new-age-islam-news-bureau/rehana-sultana-the-muslim-woman-was-hit-with-4-firs,-rape-threats-for-writing-poetry-in-her-mother-tongue,-in-assam/d/119340
--------
Rehana
Sultana the Muslim Woman Was Hit With 4 FIRs, Rape Threats For Writing Poetry
In Her Mother Tongue, in Assam
By
Piyasree Dasgupta
30/07/2019
‘Mother’,
Rehana Sultana wrote, ‘you hate me, because even though
I
was born in your lap, I am that ‘cursed Miya’.’
Sultana
was 18 when she first heard the word ‘miya’ being used as an insult. She had
just moved to Guwahati from her village in lower Assam, and had stepped out
with a group of girls from her hostel when they spotted a thin, dishevelled
rickshaw-puller coming their way. As the man stopped near them, the teenage
girls shook their heads vehemently, motioning him to move ahead even though
they needed a ride. Then one of them rolled her eyes and said, “I knew he was a
miya when I saw him coming.” The others laughed.
“I
still remember the sound of the word, the laughter and my silence,” said
Sultana, now a 28-year-old doctoral student in Gauhati University.
When,
in 2016, she wrote her first poem in the dialect she spoke at home, she felt
shaken and raw, like she had just had a painful conversation she had been
putting off for way too long.
After
she uploaded ‘I’m Miya’, written in the Miya dialect, people wrote to her on
Facebook expressing how necessary and important her writing was. Someone even
said, “May your pen never rest.”
But
three years later, Sultana’s poems have been dug up on social media and her
inbox flooded with threats and insults. She has also had four police complaints
lodged against her.
Sultana
is not alone. Over the past month, four FIRs have been lodged against Assamese
poets who identify themselves as ‘Miya’ poets—‘Miya’ being a colloquial
expression used in Assam, almost as a pejorative, to refer to Bengal or
Bangladesh-origin migrant Muslims in the state. The accusations against them
range from promoting disharmony in Assam to painting a discordant picture of
Assamese society outside the state, ironic, given the negative press that the
National Register of Citizens (NRC) itself has attracted even internationally.
Three
of these FIRs were based on complaints filed by indigenous Assamese Muslim
organisations who have traditionally wanted to distance themselves from those
Muslims whose forefathers migrated from Bangladesh. Speaking to HuffPost India,
the president of one of the organisations repeatedly said that their organisation
represented Muslims whose forefathers were from Assam and “are Assamese first
and Muslims later”.
The
attack on the poets is an extension of a larger cultural and political conflict
that has intensified as the deadline for the NRC—August 31—approaches. As lakhs
of people in Assam live in fear of losing their citizenship and being declared
illegal immigrants through the error-prone process, people like Sultana, whose
work is perceived as a threat to the Assamese subnationalist project, are also
paying a heavy price.
Reclaiming
identity through poetry
Sultana
grew up speaking both Assamese and the Miya dialect at home, but she had never
thought there could be anything ‘literary’ about the latter. The dialect,
written in the Assamese script—and easy to read if one knows Bengali or
Assamese—is spoken by a majority of migrant Muslims, especially those living
along the Brahmaputra river in Assam.
The
dialect, which is influenced by Assamese and Bengali, represents the cultural
trajectory of Muslims who migrated from Bangladesh to Assam over many decades,
beginning from the 19th century.
In
2016, poet Hafeez Ahmed was the first to write a poem in the Miya dialect—a
loose translation of the title would be “Right Now, I Am A Miya”—and upload it
on Facebook. And the first time Sultana read poetry in the Miya dialect, she
felt like the words were painting pictures in front of her.
“I
could see the tears in the eyes of the men the words spoke about, I could see
them struggling to cope with the oppression and poverty they face,” she said.
It
took her some time to realise that while she spoke many languages — English,
Hindi, Assamese — Miya was the language she felt in.
And
hence was born Miya poetry, a genre which helped writers from the community
appropriate a word that had only been bandied about as abuse until then.
Kazi
Sharowar Hussain, a 23-year-old poet and a student at Tezpur University, said
that Miya poetry was born from the need to articulate the oppression faced by
poor Muslims living in the fringes of Assam, in a language they spoke.
“The
hatred they face for being a ‘miya’, the discrimination against them when they
go to work as migrant labourers, there was a need to document their lives
without villainising them,” Hussein, who goes by the name Kazi Neel, told
HuffPost India. With Ahmed’s poem, young people like Neel and Sultana realised
that the language they spoke it could also be the language they wrote
literature in — a political assertion that came at a time the Bengali Muslim
identity in Assam was facing threats of state persecution and organised
political oppression.
While
the dominant narrative about immigrant Muslims in Assam — whose forefathers
migrated from Bangladesh — seeks to paint them as encroachers and
troublemakers, this genre of poetry sought to speak about the systemic
oppression they allegedly face. In 2016, the emergence of the trend was covered
by Al Jazeera—this report is now being used by detractors to claim that Miya
poets are ‘insulting’ Assam in front of the world.
Hussein,
for instance, has been accused of creating a false narrative of sexual violence
against poor Muslim women in the state. In one of the poems, about the
discrimation faced by economically backward minorities in the country, Hussein
wrote the lines: “The land that makes my father an alien that kills my brother
with a bullet, and gangrapes my sister…”
“It
is a metaphor for all Muslims and women irrespective of their religions.
Haven’t women, especially poor women, been gangraped in India? Haven’t men been
killed for belonging to a certain religion? Isn’t there an attempt to call many
poor Muslims ‘illegal immigrants’ in Assam? There have been cases where
7-year-old children have been left out of the NRC,” explained Hussein.
Critics,
however, have read the lines literally to contest the poet’s argument and file
police complaints.
“They
said, my father was not shot, my sister was not gangraped, I was lying,” he
said.
The
deliberate misreading doesn’t end there.
One
of the police complaints refers to a line in Hussein’s poem—‘your torture has
burnt my body black’—and demands to know: “Did you file FIR or complaint before
the appropriate authority? What is the case number? Where is the medical
report? Can you show?”
It
picks out another line that says ‘my mother is a D-voter’ and declares that it
is her duty to prove her citizenship before an ‘appropriate forum’.
“Writing
poetry is not the solution,” says the complaint.
‘You’re
the one I love’
To
Sultana, the Miya language is a ‘khichdi’, but also the one she feels closest
to. One in which she can speak about that time her college went for a day trip
and the girls giggled and rolled their eyes at a group of young women wearing
bright, red and yellow sarees. “Look, look, miyas,” they laughed, making faces
at the ‘shiny’ clothes.
Or
the time a friend told her about a ‘miya’ sewer cleaner whom her family
threatened to turn over to the police because he asked for the amount they had
agreed upon earlier.
“You
are my mother,
I
was born in your lap,
My
father and brother were born in your lap,
Mother,
Even
then, you say I am not yours
I
am nothing to you…”
Quoting
the opening lines of her first ‘Miya poem’, Sultana said that accusations that
she was trying to ‘malign’ Assam especially rankled.
“I
have studied in Assamese medium in school. I did my graduation in Assamese
literature and then my Masters in it. Later, when I began writing my doctoral
thesis, that too was in Assamese. In fact, I did not think that Miya language
was something that I could write in till very recently,” she said. In fact,
some of her poems on the miya community, have been written in Assamese. “That
is still the language I am most comfortable writing in,” she said.
Her
poems mostly speak about the experiences of poor Muslim families she has worked
with since her student days. Sultana’s doctoral thesis is on the folk
traditions of Muslims who live in ‘chars’ — temporary river islands on the
Brahmaputra — a community known to be the poorest, least educated and most
oppressed among even the minorities in Assam.
During
the course of her doctoral research, she frequently made trips to the chars and
heard stories of hungry children waiting all day for their fathers to return
home from selling odds and ends in the villages for food. But the men couldn’t
return, because they would be spending the night in police lock-ups on
suspicion of being thieves or ‘Bangladeshis’.
Sultana’s
first poems, therefore, was about an average poor migrant Muslim’s desperation
in to be counted as an Assamese. “They have given up their mother tongue, they
gave up their culture to try to fit in. ‘Mother, you don’t trust me, because I
have a beard, I wear a lungi, I am distraught from trying to prove my identity
to you, yet, despite tolerating thousands of insults, pain and deprivation, I
will stay say that you’re the one I love’ — I wrote this to capture their cries
of desperation, to be accepted even after being born here like any other
Assamese,” Sultana said.
And
the poems don’t deal with just one angle. Because they have been denied education
and are cut off from most amenities, these societies are also deeply
superstitious. Sultana’s poems do not just talk about discrimination but also
protests the doubly oppressive lives of women in that society. “Child marriage
is rampant, so is domestic violence. I wrote extensively on those issues as
well,” she said.
And
then, the abuse
After
Sultana’s first poem was published in 2016, she didn’t receive a single
critical or abusive message. So she was taken by surprise in June this year
when she saw the toxic language being unleashed on the comments section of a
friend’s status update on Miya poetry.
“Don’t
let this affect you and don’t stop, keep writing,” she commented.
On
17 June, a message landed on her inbox, calling her a prostitute and asking how
much it would cost to ‘have a night with her’. The man, called Manash, did not
try to hide his identity and messaged Sultana from a profile which he seemed to
be using to post regular content and interact with friends and family. When
Sultana did not respond, he followed up with more messages, asking her to go to
Pakistan and taking a dig at ‘beef-eating Muslims’.
While
most of the miya poets were getting trolled, being the only woman miya poet of
the group meant Sultana received a special kind of abuse.
She
was sent graphic descriptions of how ‘miya’ men must be masturbating at women
like her, long messages about the alleged sexual excesses of her community,
accusations that she probably wants ‘40 children’, and assertions that miyas
are rapists who should be cut up in public. And, unsurprisingly, multiple rape
threats. Once Sultana changed the privacy settings of her Facebook profile and
the men couldn’t comment on her posts, she received messages saying that they
wanted to write things about “her vagina, nipples” on the posts. They dared her
to change the privacy settings.
One
man wrote, “We are so disgusted by you that we won’t come near miya girls even
if they stood naked in front of us.”
“I
thought of reporting them but how many will I report? I am one person,” she
said.
In
some of the screenshots Sultana shared with HuffPost India, women also
participated in degrading conversations about her and when the men wondered who
she was, some of them posted links to her Facebook profile in the comments
threads.
One
of Sultana’s friends, a Hindu Assamese woman, who defended miya poets on
Facebook, had to deal with torrents of men commenting on the nature of her
relationship with the male miya poets, each conversation sexually coloured and
obscene. Sultana’s WhatsApp inbox also started getting flooded with threatening
messages.
“I
work and study in Guwahati University. Many people have my number, it’s not
difficult to get it,” she said.
The
messages were so graphic and disturbing that Sultana was forced to switch off
her phone. When this correspondent tried to get in touch with her two weeks
ago, her brother informed HuffPost India that she had stopped using the phone
because it was flooded with threatening, abusive messages. Even her family
could only get in touch with her by calling people around her—friends when she
was at university, relatives when she was visiting their homes.
“It
became unbearable and honestly, the slew of obscene messages made me feel deep
shame. Every time my phone buzzed, I froze, thinking someone will message me
asking for sex or threatening to rape me,” she said.
Initially,
Sultana thought she would file police complaints against these men and women.
But she decided against it because in her village where her parents live,
getting embroiled in ‘police cases’ was always made out to be a statement on a
woman’s character, not the perpetrator’s.
“They
will not understand any Miya poetry, or Facebook or protest. They will think I
must have done something terrible to have gotten the police involved. It’s a
matter of deep shame there,” she said.
And
the police were not far behind, either. Over the next few weeks, as Sultana
wondered how to deal with this onslaught of verbal violence, four FIRs were
lodged against her in quick succession.
The
NRC connection
Sultana
and her friends did not know most of the people who had filed the FIRs, but
they weren’t surprised.
“Almost
the whole of Assam were talking about our poetry and from the hatred I was
getting, it was clear that people had been tracking us for a while and were
waiting for the right opportunity to pounce on us,” she said.
While
Miya poetry is a literary expression of the social challenges of the Muslims in
Assam, Sultana and some others writers had gone beyond that to help poor people
make sense of the many layers of the hard-to-understand NRC process, including
foreigner tribunals, biometric databases and court summons.
She
has often participated in camps organised by activists across Assam’s poorest
minority belts to help people understand the nitty gritties of the complex
process they have unwillingly been thrown into.
“There
are times these men and women who live on chars go to villages to sell the
fruits and vegetables they have grown. A Border Police person will pick them
up, take them to the police station and take their names and addresses down.
They are so poor and scared that they do not question the authorities. Days,
months and at times years later, they will get a notice asking them to prove
their citizenship before a foreigner tribunal or go to jail,” she said.
While
working on her doctoral thesis, Sultana realised that many villagers often land
in detention camps because they could not read a summons, did not understand
what documents were needed from them and where to get them and when asked to
produce papers, showed something else, angering the government officials.
“A
large part of their fate depends on the babus not getting angry or irritated
with them when they mistakenly mess up documents. So we organise camps to look
at their documents and direct them to the right authorities to get documents,”
Sultana said.
Her
work includes getting the right forms, filling them out, writing appeals to
government offices for copies of documents to help prove citizenship and then
patiently explaining this to the men and women and marking out the documents
they needed to furnish.
Though
she has been doing her research for some years now, Sultana says that it is the
advent of the BJP government in Assam and the rise of majoritarian chauvinism
that has especially targeted people like her and those she has been helping.
“It
is clear that the multiple FIRs against us are meant to scare us and thwart the
work we are doing to help these people get their paperwork sorted, so that they
can’t be declared foreigners or kept out of the NRC,” she said.
Us
versus them
So
why did Muslim organisations themselves file police complaints against the Miya
poets?
“These
Bengali-speaking immigrant Muslims… the Assamese people cooperated with him,
let they stay with love, let them cultivate land and rear animals, taught them
Assamese and now they are saying they were tortured?” Hafijul Ahmed, president
of Sadou Assam Godia Moria Deshi Jatiya Parishad (An Indigenous Assamese
Muslims Body) told HuffPost India.
According
to him, Sultana and her fellow poets were disturbing communal harmony before
the publication of the NRC. It was the reach they had through social media that
seemed especially worrying to him.
“It
was okay if it was in a book. But they are writing on social media, making
videos and spreading them. So we appealed that the people responsible for law
and order in the state look into them and stop them,” he said, emphasising that
his organisation did not represent migrant Muslims.
Ahmed’s
organisation is a subsidiary of the powerful student’s organisation All Assam
Students’ Union (AASU), which has been at the forefront of leading the stir
against “illegal immigrants”.
Jyotirmoy
Talukdar, a professor at Ashoka University, said that Miyas face deep
persecution in the state, and that no indigenous Muslim will want to do
anything with them and be targeted themselves.
“Indigenous
Muslims have always sided with Assamese subnationalism and Assamese
subnationalism is staunchly linguistic,” he said.
Last
week, Sultana finally got bail in all the three FIRs filed against her, and
decided that she would give her parents some idea of what was happening to her.
“I
stay in Guwahati and both my parents are old and suffer from high blood
pressure. If my mother heard about a FIR, she would die,” she said.
https://www.huffingtonpost.in/entry/nrc-miya-poets-assam-woman_in_5d3f3e2ee4b0d24cde03f6d6
--------
Sadaf
Jaffer, From NJ Mayor to Congress: Muslim Women Targets of Hate
Jul
30, 2019
Sadaf
Jaffer made headlines after she became the first female Muslim mayor in New
Jersey, and possibly in the nation, in January. Then came the hate.
Hundreds
of tweets poured in saying that the new mayor of Montgomery would implement
sharia law and warning of a Muslim “invasion” and “jihadist takeover.”
“It
was exhausting. How much of this can you take in?” said Jaffer, noting that she
spent days going through messages and reporting them to Twitter. “There are
some really very dark corners out there and unfortunately our president is
really stoking the hatred.”
The
bigoted comments directed at Jaffer lay bare the incredible contradiction of
public expectations for Muslim women in America. Muslim women are stereotyped
as oppressed, silent and failing to assimilate. But when these women take
leadership positions in community and government, proving their critics wrong,
they are still maligned for being involved while Muslim.
It’s
a pattern that has spanned from a mayor’s office in a New Jersey township up to
Congress, where two Muslim congresswomen, Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib, have
been called pro-terrorist and un-American, where they’ve had to hire extra
security because of death threats, where their every word is scrutinized and,
sometimes, distorted.
Still,
female Muslim leaders and organizers said in interviews they would not back
down because of the backlash they or others have faced.
SadafChanging
minds at the local level Jaffer, who has degrees from Harvard and Georgetown
University School of Foreign Service and is a postdoctoral researcher a Princeton
University, envisioned a career in diplomacy.
When
she grew unhappy with her local representation in Congress, she became involved
in local politics. She saw it an effective way to make a difference by
interacting with residents and building bridges among communities.
“People
are so focused on state and national and international issues that they neglect
the local,” said Jaffer, 36. “A lot of our problems are at the local level
where you meet face to face.”
In
her community, she heard a handful of negative comments alluding to her faith
and saw fliers calling her ideas “extreme” and “dangerous.” But she said it was
mostly outsiders, people who did not know her, who sent her messages of hate.
“I
think locally my being Muslim is not really very relevant,” she said. “It’s
just incidental.”
Jaffer
helped start a New Jersey-based group, called Inspiring South Asian American
Women, that promotes civic involvement and public service. She’s glad to serve
as an example to others.
https://wisconsinmuslimjournal.org/from-nj-mayor-to-congress-muslim-women-targets-of-hate/
--------
Saudi
Ministry of Justice Announces Notary Public Vacancies for Women
29
July, 2019
The
Saudi Ministry of Justice announced Grade 7 notary public vacancies for women,
who will work at notarial offices across the Kingdom.
The
ministry has been focusing on female employment within the legal sector as part
of its plans to support and empower women, widen career options and help them
play a bigger role in this sector.
The
new announcement of notary public posts is considered a milestone for the
ministry to offer women an opportunity to enroll in such important government
positions.
Previously
eligible female employees worked in private notarial offices, helping them
provide wider notarial services options to clients and offering greater
efficiency.
The
ministry explained that applications will be announced on July 30 and
applicants will have a week to apply through its website.
https://aawsat.com/english/home/article/1834941/saudi-ministry-justice-announces-notary-public-vacancies-women
--------
Women
Taking Photos Of Themselves Without Headscarves Face 10-Year Prison Sentence In
Iran
July
29, 2019
Iranian
women who post photos of themselves online without their headscarves on could
face up to 10 years in prison.
They
face the punishment for posting images or video online, and for sending them to
Masih Alinejad, a US-based activist who founded the “White Wednesdays” campaign
in Iran to oppose the compulsory hijab.
The
campaign encourages women to post photos of themselves without headscarves.
The
semi-official Fars news agency quoted the head of the Tehran Revolutionary
Court, Mousa Ghazanfarabadi, saying “those who film themselves or others while
removing the hijab and send photos to this woman ... will be sentenced to
between one and 10 years in prison.”
Wearing
the Islamic headscarf is mandatory in public for all women in Iran. Those who
violate the rule face up to two months in prison and a fine of £20.
Scores
of women in Iran have been arrested for removing their headscarves as part of
the “White Wednesdays” campaign.
Last
year, an Iranian woman was sentenced to two years in prison and 18 years
probation for removing her headscarf in a protest.
Shaparak
Shajarizadeh said she had been sentenced for “opposing the compulsory hijab”
and “waving a white flag of peace in the street”.
https://news.yahoo.com/women-taking-photos-themselves-without-132854251.html
--------
The
Curious Reaction to a Niqab-Wearing Homophobe
Brendan
O'Neill
29
July 2019
Are
we allowed to criticise the niqab yet? This question crossed my mind as I
watched that viral clip of a niqab-clad woman hurling homophobic invective at a
Pride marcher in Walthamstow in London. Surely now it will become acceptable to
raise questions about this medieval garment (banned in several Muslim
countries) and about the views and attitudes of those who wear it?
On
one level, the footage of the niqab-wearering lady spouting anti-gay hate
wasn’t very surprising. Shocking, yes, but not surprising. It’s not as if
someone who covers themselves from head to toe in archaic black cloth (which,
as Qanta Ahmed has said, is not in the least suggested let alone mandated by
the Koran) is going to hold enlightened views on sexuality. Stop the press —
religious fundamentalist is not a fan of gay sex!
Disgusting
homophobic abuse at those on Waltham Forest Pride today.
No
matter what form hate comes in, we must stamp it out and say no to all forms of
hate! Also, very importantly we cannot call out one form of hate but be
silent/complicit on others. @GalopUK @stonewalluk pic.twitter.com/kDAFoAb8Vw
—
Yusuf Patel (@YusufJP_) July 27, 2019
‘Shame
on you’, the woman shouts at the man who is draped in a Pride flag. ‘God made
Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve’, she continued, bizarrely adding a dash of
old, Alf Garnett-style homophobia to her broader Koran-inspired loathing of
homosexuality. I guess this is a kind of ‘melting pot’ of cultures —
1950s-style homegrown homophobia with a dash of Eastern-inspired extremism.
The
clip has caused much discomfort in woke-left circles. After all, the woke crew
like gay people and women who wear the niqab. How are they meant to respond to
such a public spat between two of their favourite identity groups?
What
a pickle. Condemn the religious nutter and risk joining Boris Johnson in that
camp of nasty Islamophobes who slag off niqab-wearers? Or be soft on the
screaming lady and risk implying that it is sometimes okay to bark insults at
gay people? What is an intersectional leftist to do!
Their
solution, it seems, is to be more gentle with this homophobe than they would be
with other homophobes. The local MP Stella Creasy says she was ‘gutted’ to see
this clash — a tellingly passive word.
The
Independent’s coverage dances around the fact that the woman was wearing a
niqab, informing its readers that the abusive woman was ‘dressed in black, with
a black veil and black-rimmed glasses’. Okay. Can we be more specific? She was
wearing ‘clothing commonly associated with female followers of Islam’, the
paper said. We got there in the end! Strikingly, the Indie report doesn’t
mention the word ‘niqab’. Perhaps it thought mentioning the N-word would set
off the Islamophobes.
And
is it only me who finds it pretty alarming that the victim of the woman’s abuse
says in response to her, ‘We still love you’? Another Pride attendee can be
heard informing her that ‘fascists’ say the same thing about her as she is
saying about gay people. Why such leniency? Why didn’t they tell her to eff
off, as they undoubtedly, and rightly, would have done if it had been any other
kind of anti-gay hysteric?
All
you have to do is imagine if the person shouting anti-gay abuse had been a big
white bloke with an east London accent and loads of tattoos and a St George’s
flag hanging from his back pocket. Do you think Ms Creasy would only have been
‘gutted’ in that instance? Or that the Twitterati would have been as cagey as
they have been in response to the niqab loon? Of course not.
And
herein lies the problem. It is precisely the obsessive ringfencing of Islam
from normal levels of scrutiny that encourages some of its adherents — some,
note — to cling to backward views.
If
your views are never confronted, and in fact are protected from confrontation
by an Islamophobia industry that depicts virtually any criticism of Islam as a
hate crime, how are you ever meant to rethink what you think? To change your
mind? To analyse your beliefs and try to move forward to a more progressive
view of the world?
If
this niqab-wearing woman thinks she can waltz through her community hurling
backward religious hatred at gay people, should we really be surprised? After
all, she lives in a country where even criticising the niqab itself is a no no,
as Boris discovered when he rightly called it an oppressive and ridiculous
garment, and also rightly said it should not be banned.
Boris
was right. The niqab is ridiculous and oppressive. It is also anti-social, a
big, black ‘screw you’ to contemporary society. It is a hostile garment,
declaring the wearer’s fealty to archaic religious values and her disdain for
the liberal, licentious society she lives in.
It
shouldn’t be banned, of course. Women must be free to wear it. But by the same
token the rest of us must be free to say that it is a stupid and offensive
thing to wear and that the Waltham Forest homophobe is probably fairly typical
of those who wear it.
Things
have now been made worse by the involvement of the police, who are
investigating this woman’s alleged hate crime. We don’t need more
authoritarianism. We don’t need more speech-policing. We just need a more open
and critical public sphere in which everything, including Islam, is up for
debate.
https://blogs.spectator.co.uk/2019/07/the-curious-reaction-to-a-niqab-wearing-homophobe/
--------
The
Overlooked Wisdom of Arab Women Journalists in the Middle East
Eloise
Blondiau
July
29, 2019
“Even
in wartime,” writes journalist Hannah Allam, women in Najaf, Iraq, wear
abayas—“long billowy robes that leave only their faces, hands, and feet
exposed.”
After
she repeatedly came under fire, Allam learned how to run in an abaya. “You use
your left hand to hold the silky fabric under your chin to keep it in place and
your right hand to hike up the bottom to free your feet. Then you run in a
zigzag pattern to avoid giving a clear shot to the snipers.”
This
is just one small snapshot of life in Iraq during the war, provided by one of
the 19 safiyat—or women journalists—in Our Women on the Ground: Essays by Arab
Women Reporting from the Arab World. Lebanese-British journalist Zahra Hankir
has compiled a collection of gripping and illuminating essays by Arab women
reporters who have worked in the Middle East and North Africa, with a foreword
by the formidable Christiane Amanpour, CNN’s chief international anchor. Hankir’s
goal was to bring attention to “underreported tales and the women who tell
them.”
In
her contribution to the anthology, Allam (currently a correspondent at NPR,
formerly of McClatchy and Buzzfeed News) describes how in 2004, she hid with
women inside the besieged Imam Ali shrine—a Shiite Muslim mosque in
Najaf—during a siege that dragged on for weeks, with the bodies of local men
continually being brought inside. When Allam escaped with her translator, two
Iraqi women saved them and drove them to their hotel. “Every time Iraq began to
unravel,” she writes, “it was women who worked the hardest to stitch it back
together.”
Earlier
this year, the Daily Mail published an article that pushed a familiar and
misleading picture of journalists in the Arab world. “EXCLUSIVE,” the tagline
read. “Tinder sex with Muslim women, tequila and drugs until dawn: My real life
as a Washington Post war correspondent—and how Jeff Bezos’ paper wouldn’t pay
for me to deal with my PTSD.”
The
piece glorified the trope of a self-destructive, James Bond-esque white male
reporter bravely traipsing into the Middle East to cover conflict, all the
while cavorting with local women who are—horror!—Muslim. (A later edit,
possibly due to backlash, changed “Muslim women” to “Middle Eastern women”—not
that it altered the paper’s exoticization of them.) The article also completely
overlooked the trauma of local people that the featured journalist was
covering.
The
piece bothered readers like Buzzfeed’s global director of news curation, Sara
Yasin, who wrote on Twitter: “There are loads of traumatized local reporters
who talk about their experiencing [sic] without degrading anyone else.”
Our
Women on the Ground is proof of that. Some of the essayists talk about covering
their home communities in places like Syria, Palestine, Yemen and Egypt. Others
report on the home countries of their forebears or travel even farther afield
across the Middle East and North Africa. But all of the writers offer careful
consideration of their own relation to the people they interviewed and the
context they worked in.
Jane
Arraf, a Palestinian-Canadian journalist at NPR who has previously worked at
CNN and Al Jazeera, reflects on her time reporting on the Iraq war. She writes
about finding an imam in a courtyard, surrounded by the severed limbs of people
killed in a suicide bombing near the Kathimiya shrine in Baghdad. Grasping for
words, she said: “I’m so sorry,” in Arabic and English. “You’re sorry?!” he
replied. There was nothing to say.
Arraf
later asks herself: Would it have been equally painful to watch the war unfold
had she not been Arab? “I think the tragic miscalculations of the war would
have been [equally painful to watch],” she decides. “But I might not have been
as conscious of the depth of misunderstandings as worlds collided.”
https://www.americamagazine.org/arts-culture/2019/07/29/overlooked-wisdom-arab-women-journalists-middle-east
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Pakistan
HR Minister Plans To Expand ‘Women Police Station’ In Rural Areas
Jul
30, 2019
ISLAMABAD:
Federal Minister for Human Rights Dr Shireen Mazari said on Monday that
Ministry of Human Rights has planned to expand women police stations in rural
areas of the country to ensure easy access for women victims of violence to law
and justice.
She
said her ministry would launch women police stations in typical rural areas of
the country with trained officers to attend female complaints in cases ranging
from domestic abuse to property disputes.
The
task of women police stations would be to investigate all such cases involving
women either when they were victims or accused, she added.
She
said that the purpose of setting up the women police station at district levels
was to provide the persecuted women in the male-dominated society a safe way to
report their grievances to police.
“Women
police officers in their areas will provide necessary information regarding the
prevention of domestic violence because prevention is the most effective way of
security of the female,” she added. These women police station would be fully
operational and all records facility will also be computerized, she added.
Her
government is committed to ensuring the empowerment of women as their
participation in all walks of life is necessary for sustainable development,
she mentioned. She said the government was continuously undertaking reforms so
as to enable women to participate in all walks of life. She also expressed his
concern on child abuse incidents in the country and said all walks of society
should come forward to root out this menace.
Minister
said her ministry has already launched a special mass awareness drive to
sensitize public about the rights of Children. After the Eidul Azha Human
Rights ministry would start an awareness drive in the capital at school and
higher education institutional level to raise awareness on violence against
children and child protection where we will decide to train police for this
purpose as well, she added.
Mazari
said Human Rights Ministry would soon launch a massive campaign to sensitize
people on accessibility issues concerning persons with disabilities, rights to
children and transgenders besides creating awareness on improving facilities
for them.
Minister
of HR said HRM has also started awareness campaigns for women s right to
inheritance and provision of free legal aid to the women. We are working with
law ministry to establish a statutory body to provide legal services and
assistance, especially for women through providing free of cost lawyers, she
added.
She
said an anti-corporal punishment bill will also be tabled soon in the
parliament to discourage physical punishment and abuse at schools, as will a
bill named Zainab Alert to stop child
sexual abuse. She said the government had taken marvellous steps for the
welfare and progress of women in society so that they could play an effective
role in the prosperity of the country.
A
solid strategy has been devised to fulfil the basic needs of the masses,
adding, public service agenda of PM Imran Khan would be fulfilled and no one
would be allowed to hinder the journey of public service.
Minister
said that the incumbent govt was working to provide the best basic facilities
to all its citizens and assured that deprived areas would be brought at par
with the developed cities. She said that development and prosperity were the
fundamental rights of every citizen.
A
helpline 1099 has also been launched by the Human Rights Ministry to provide
free legal advice in this regard, she said, adding where almost 1000 complaints
were registered daily.
https://www.pakistantoday.com.pk/2019/07/29/hr-plans-to-expand-women-police-station-in-rural-areas-says-mazari/
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Leila
Hosseinzadeh, Tehran U Student Activist, Taken To Evin Prison
Jul
29, 2019
Student
activist Leila Hosseinzadeh was arrested by intelligence forces on Sunday, July
28, 2019, and transferred to the Evin Prison to serve her jail sentence.
Tehran
Province’s Appeals Court upheld the 2.5-year sentence of Leila Hosseinzadeh on
June 24, 2019. She is also deprived of leaving the country for two years after
serving her sentence.
Leila
Hosseinzadeh is a master’s student of Anthropology at Tehran University. She
was the secretary of Tehran University students’ central council who had gotten
arrested during the nationwide uprisings in December 2017-January 2018, but was
later released on bail.
In
other developments, women’s rights activist Esrin Derkaleh was arrested by
intelligence agents and security forces on Sunday, July 28, 2019, and taken
away to an unknown location. Along with Maryam Mohammadi and Narges KHorrami,
she had been summoned to the Prosecutor’s Office on June 16, 2019. The three
women’s rights activists are members of The Voice of Iranian Women Association
(Anjoman-e Neday-e Zanan-e Iran) and were mainly active in women’s literacy
movement. Maryam Mohammadi and Esrin Derkaleh had addressed the March 8
gathering of the Voice of Iranian Women Association, this past March on the
International Women’s Day.
Previously,
on July 8, 2019, Maryam Mohammadi had been arrested at home and taken away to
prison.
Another
female civil activist, Parvin Nokhostin, whose activities focus on the rights
of children lacking identity papers, was summoned to the Department of
Intelligence on July 24, 2019. She had delivered a speech on the International
Women’s Day at a ceremony organized by the Voice of Iranian Women Association.
A
number of members of this association have so far been arrested, including the
arrests of Akram Nasirian in April, and Nahid Shaqaqi in May.
Akram
Nasirian is an activist in the literacy movement and had been actively engaged
in sending aid to flood victims.
https://women.ncr-iran.org/2019/07/29/tehran-u-student-activist-leila-hosseinzadeh-taken-to-evin-prison/
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