Monsoons (close enough)

We had enough rain on Sunday to need a few sandbags on one of the streets of the University. Or rather, on what was the street; it had turned into a river. I found out that I have a hole not just in one shoe, but both, while fording this river. It had been raining since Thursday and it finally stopped today. For the most part, I enjoyed the rain, since I didn't have to be out in it much, but it was also nice to see the sun today.

I haven't written in a few days because the internet has been rather unreliable. Apparently, for some reason at the end of the month the internet gets really slow. The other CIEE people I know who have witribe (the wireless internet service I have) experienced the same thing.


Anyway, moving on. My classes are progressing, although I think we could be going a little bit faster in Arabic. The Arab Women Writer's class has been especially interesting. We started by reading several chapters in Leila Ahmed's "Women and Gender in Islam." Had read parts of that book before, but not these chapters which focused on Egypt in the early 20th century and the interactions between the imperialist power (Britain), the first feminists, and various Egyptian nationalist and Islamic groups which were emerging at the time. According to Ahmed, this was the period when the "women's issue" became a matter of national importance, a position that it has maintained since then, largely thanks to the British. The Western powers in the Middle East (mainly Britain and France) used the supposed oppression of women, so defined by the practices of female seclusion, veiling, polygamy, and child marriage, to legitimate their economic and political domination. That isn't to say that there wasn't necessary oppression going on, but that is a very tricky word to define and in this instance, the word was used by some imperialists as merely a tool to explain the necessity of their presence: to civilize the ignorant peoples of the Middle East. One possible reason for why this issue was highlighted above others that they might have chosen is that it coincided with the rise of the feminist movement in Europe and the States. Ironically, one of the greatest spokesmen for the "liberation" of Egyptian women was Lord Cromer, who apparently founded the "Men's League for Opposing Women's Suffrage" in England. The main focus of these "liberation" efforts was to get women to unveil, not to educate them (in fact fewer women were educated under the British than before they took control) or empower them politically. Egyptian nationalists took the symbols attacked by the British, like veiling, and sought to defend them because they opposed on principle anything the British supported, which further reinforced the importance of the "woman issue." This discourse is the root, according to Ahmed, of the ongoing controversy surrounding Muslim women and the veil, both in the West (especially in media) and in the Middle East.

Most of Ahmed's ideas were familiar to me, and her logic makes sense. When I was first starting to research Muslim women and the issues surrounding them, the attention given to the veil didn't really make sense to me. It may be true that some forms of hijab are physically uncomfortable or inconvenient, but it seems that lack of education, political rights, social rights, and lack of voice in general should be more important issues. The veil is a symbol of those things for some people (Westerners), but to think that by simply getting rid of it would therefore get rid of all those other problems seemed overly simplistic to me. There are certainly instances where a woman is forced by a male member of her family (husband, uncle, father, brother, etc.) to wear the hijab, but the majority of the women that I have talked to here and in Egypt about it have declared quite proudly that they chose to wear the veil, either for religious or political reasons. The political reasons go back to the efforts of the British (and in other countries other imperialist powers) to eradicate the veil, which turned it into a symbol of resistance and nationalism. Another of Ahmed's points, however, was that all the attention given to the veil masked the fact that the British seem to have done nearly nothing for women during their control of Egypt, and in fact did harm in some areas. There were even European (and maybe American) feminists who supported the imperialist project against the veil, without realizing the shallowness of that crusade.

Feminism is another issue that we have been discussing a lot in Arab Women Writer's. Over here, it is a dirty word, signifying an adoption of another culture (the West) in place of the native culture. I believe that this is an issue for many former colonized countries, as are other ideas that are viewed as Western imports. (Technology is fine though.) Rula, the professor of my class, is a self-proclaimed feminist, but she has been very frank about the difficulties of using that word, as well as other imported terminology, such as gender. People hear these words and shut down, it seems. I haven't witnessed this myself, but I also haven't asked any questions using the term feminism yet. I did ask my peer tutor about the hijab (she wears one), and she has promised to give me a lecture, complete with sources from the Qur'an and hadiths at our next meeting. It will be interesting to hear her take on it as opposed to Rula.