Showing posts tagged culture

Africans shocked by uncivilized antics of European savages

DAKAR. Africans say they have little hope that Europe will ever become civilized, after a week in which Spain’s King Carlos went on an elephant-killing spree and the Swedish Culture Minister was entertained by a racially offensive cake. “You can take the European out of the jungle, but you can’t take the jungle out of the European,” sighed one resident of Kinshasa.

August Mwanasa, of Libreville in Gabon, said the latest atrocities didn’t surprise him as Europeans were still “savages”.

“I don’t want to sound racist, and some of my best friend are white, but let’s be honest: violence is hard-wired into their DNA,” said Mwanasa. “I mean, Europeans killed over 20 million other Europeans in the 1930s and 1940s. That’s barbarism on a scale unprecedented in history.”

Jenkins Odumbe, a Nairobi milliner, bemoaned ingrained attitudes of entitlement in Europe.

“If they’re not going on the dole they’re asking for bail-outs,” he said. “Why can’t they just get up earlier and work harder, that’s what I want to know?”

Liberte Aidoo,  a Ghanaian travel agent, said she had been “shocked and disgusted” by what she found on her first trip to Spain.

“The brochures promise sea and sun, but they’re still incredibly backward in Spain,” she recalled. “Basically they all live in mud huts called haciendas, and they sleep for two hours in the middle of the day. In Europe they call it a ‘siesta’. In Ghana we call it ‘being fucking lazy’.”

But, she added, this kind of “depressing inertia” was to be expected in a country with more debt than most of Africa combined.

Meanwhile, most Africans have dismissed calls for Swedish Culture Minister Lena Adelsohn Liljeroth to resign following the debacle in which she was photographed eating a cake designed to look like a racist caricature of an African woman.

“The only people calling for her to resign are European liberals hiding behind a thin veneer of civilization,” explained Burundian sociologist, Descarte Tugiramahoro. “We Africans are not shocked in the slightest.

“All she’s doing is engaging in two ancient European rituals: giggling at people who look different, and symbolic cannibalism, as introduced by the Catholic Church. It’s all completely normal.”

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What should be stressed is that throughout history, Egyptian women activists have been discredited by different constituencies by being labelled western agents of colonialism or imperialism. The debate over the intellectual origins of the Egyptian women’s movement constitutes an ongoing controversy among contemporary Egyptian feminists. The debate entails several questions, which are significant for self-definitions and struggles for legitimacy among present-day activists. Most women activists today are not very much concerned with the question of whether the intellectual origins of the Egyptian women’s movement have to be traced back to male reformers or women journalists. What is much more at stake today is the issue of whether the intellectual roots have to be traced back to “western” or “indigenous” sources. The charge of emulating “western thought” and thereby betraying “authentic culture” has constituted a continuous challenge to Egyptian feminists. From its very beginnings until the present day various constituencies opposed to the struggle for women’s rights (Islamists as well as nationalist-leftists) have engaged in an evaluation of women activists with regard to their level of “authenticity”or “westernness”. As elaborated in greater detail elsewhere, it is these forces which continuously and successfully use the argument of “our indigenous culture” vs “western culture” every time gender relations and women’s rights are addressed. The “culturalization” of political issues has become so naturalized in contemporary Egypt as in many other parts of the Arab world, that it seems very difficult to doubt the legitimacy of this practice and question its grounds.
Women’s Movements in the Middle East 

Gendered Legal Process

“The legal process in the new court system is gendered in a number of ways: First, the substantive personal status laws that are implemented in family courts do not give husbands and wives equal rights: men have unconditional right to unilateral divorce and polygny; they are entitled to women’s obedience and sexual submission in exchange of financial support. Women’s right to divorce is conditioned by the fulfillment of numerous procedures and requirements, some of which can be very difficult such as the proof of ‘harm’ in the case of prejudicial divorce or waiting for a period of a year after the sentencing of an imprisoned husband in order to obtain divorce. Women are entitled to be the custodial parents of their children in the event of divorce until the children reach 15; however, they lose custody if they remarry. In addition, in the case of divorce, women lose claim to the conjugal home, and are instead entitled to housing allowance (often meager and inadequate) only if they are custodial parents. Fathers have full legal guardianship over their minor children; while mothers-even when they are the custodial parents- do not have that right. The point is that the differentiated and unequal legal standing and rights that men and women are granted by the substantive personal status laws do impact the work of family courts. The gendered content of the laws are mirrored in court documents and are at play in mediation sessions and court proceedings. Therefore, in so much as some of the substantive family laws are biased against women, the benefits that women can gain from the new court system are diminished.  

Another gendered dimension of the legal process is court personnel’s views on female rationality, female sexuality, and gender roles in marriage. These views are frequently articulated in court proceedings and mediation sessions. One of these views, for instance, considers women as emotional and hasty, and therefore often incapable of making rational decisions about dissolving their marriage and obtaining divorce.  Some of the mediation specialists and court experts pointed out how young women resort to khul hastily over petty reasons such as the husband’s refusal to buy them the kind of shampoo they prefer or because of a disagreement over the color of the upholstery for the furniture in the conjugal home. This skepticism about women’s rationality, particularly when it comes to decisions about divorce, was also accompanied by questionable strategies that some mediation specialists and judges used when they attempted to reconcile disputants. 

A common strategy that was used was to warn the female disputant of the difficulties and stigma that awaited her if she became a divorced woman. One judge, for instance, tried to persuade a plaintiff to reconsider her divorce claim by warning her that her young daughter would probably have a difficult life with limited prospects for marriage and respectability if her mother became a divorcee.”

Family Courts in Egypt

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Reference to the Western woman as a paradigm to be followed or denounced is a major feature of the discourse on women. A package of moral laxity, pornography, casual sex, materialism, and disappearance of family ties is usually assembled by the religious debating voices like Al Bahi who devotes half his book describing the corrupt conditions of the Western woman. The same approach was followed earlier in the century by Talat Harb, and is followed by many other religious proponents of unveiling. Another extreme would put the Western woman as paradigm to be emulated, the strongest voice in that extreme is Kasim Amin.
Ghada Barsoum, Polemics on the Veil in Egypt

A Border Passage - Leila Ahmed

In language that vividly evokes the lush summers of Cairo and the stark beauty of the Arabian desert, Leila Ahmed tells a moving tale of her Egyptian childhood growing up in a rich tradition of Islamic women and describes how she eventually came to terms with her identity as a feminist living in America.

As a young woman in Cairo in the 1940s and ’50s, Ahmed witnessed some of the major transformations of this century—the end of British colonialism, the creation of Israel, the rise of Arab nationalism, and the breakdown of Egypt’s once multireligious society. Amid the turmoil, she searched to define herself—and to see how the world defined her—as a woman, a Muslim, an Egyptian, and an Arab. In this memoir, she poignantly reflects upon issues of language, race, and nationality, while unveiling the hidden world of women’s Islam. Ahmed’s story will be an inspiration to anyone who has ever struggled to define their own cultural identity.

Highly recommended! I wish I could find more of her books. 

Culture or religion? I think this video more than anything else shows that the two have become so intertwined that even the muslim community seems to be incapable of discussing the hijab without resorting to cultural myths that are blatantly sexist and have nothing to do with Islam. Western feminism sometimes fails to see how, in some contexts, covering up can be liberating and empowering. But sadly our response is usually to talk about how “immodest” women are disrespected by men, have lower self esteem and appear less intelligent — countering their broken straw man with one of our own.

If a man is disrespecting you based on an arbitrary cultural line that has been drawn to separate the “good girls” from the “sluts”, then you do not use the hijab to validate and perpetuate this mentality. In other cultures, or other eras, in order to earn that same level of respect you had to cover your face, stay indoors, only interact with women, etc. This was true for many women in Egypt just over a century ago. These deluded notions of modesty are entirely cultural and are born from misogynistic traditions and customs. I’m not telling anyone why they should wear the hijab or what to believe in, but using this particular reason is incredibly harmful and misleading.