“Wandering Around an Albuquerque Airport Terminal”

By Naomi Shihab Nye

After learning my flight was detained 4 hours, I heard the announcement: If anyone in the vicinity of gate 4-A understands any Arabic, please come to the gate immediately.

Well — one pauses these days. Gate 4-A was my own gate. I went there. An older woman in full traditional Palestinian dress, just like my grandma wore, was crumpled to the floor, wailing loudly. Help, said the flight service person. Talk to her. What is her problem? We told her the flight was going to be four hours late and she did this.

I put my arm around her and spoke to her haltingly. Shu dow-a, shu-biduck habibti, stani stani schway, min fadlick, sho bit se-wee? The minute she heard any words she knew — however poorly used – she stopped crying. She thought our flight had been cancelled entirely. She needed to be in El Paso for some major medical treatment the following day. I said, No, no, we’re fine, you’ll get there, just late, who is picking you up? Let’s call him and tell him.

We called her son and I spoke with him in English. I told him I would stay with his mother till we got on the plane and would ride next to her. She talked to him. Then we called her other sons just for the fun of it. Then we called my dad and he and she spoke for a while in Arabic and found out, of course, they had ten shared friends. Then I thought, just for the heck of it, why not call some Palestinian poets I know and let them chat with her. This all took up about 2 hours. She was laughing a lot by then. Telling about her life. Answering questions.

She had pulled a sack of homemade mamool cookies — little powdered sugar crumbly mounds stuffed with dates and nuts — out of her bag — and was offering them to all the women at the gate. To my amazement, not a single woman declined one. It was like a sacrament. The traveler from Argentina, the traveler from California, the lovely woman from Laredo — we were all covered with the same powdered sugar. And smiling. There are no better cookies.

And then the airline broke out the free beverages from huge coolers — non-alcoholic — and the two little girls for our flight, one African-American, one Mexican-American — ran around serving us all apple juice and lemonade and they were covered with powdered sugar, too.

And I noticed my new best friend — by now we were holding hands — had a potted plant poking out of her bag, some medicinal thing, with green furry leaves. Such an old country traveling tradition. Always carry a plant. Always stay rooted to somewhere.

And I looked around that gate of late and weary ones and thought, “This is the world I want to live in. The shared world. Not a single person in this gate — once the crying of confusion stopped — has seemed apprehensive about any other person. They took the cookies. I wanted to hug all those other women, too. This can still happen, anywhere.

Not everything is lost.

Here are my thoughts on the matter:

1. Patriarchal religions fear women. Period.

2. Patriarchal religions fear women’s power. Why then would in Christianity would Mary Magdalene be consistently be portrayed as a whore and there be an infinite number of laws pertaining to menstruation in religious laws? So many in fact that I actually read about one on the wrapper to an Always sanitary pad in London when I was at SOAS. Yes, really.

3. Women with a religious education threaten the Taleban. Somehow the Taleban has negated the power and influence of ‘Aisha, one of the most prolific and prominent early scholars of Islam. And yes, I’m talking about the Prophet Muhammad (pbuh)’s wife.

4. Anyone with a proper religious education that was not conducted in a cave in Tora Bora is a threat to the Taleban. Literacy = BAD. Literacy gives a population power and that’s definitely NOT what the Taleban wants. Fortunately for them, because Islam encourages memorisation and celebrates the ability of people to recite the Qur’an and use hadith in every day life, literacy is not really necessary. Necessary for fundos that is… the rest of us would like to be able to read Qur’an and Bukhari, thanks.

5. Women are the nation. Mothers would teach their sons and daughters about Islam. Proper Islam. Literate families, women transmitting Islam! HOW UN-ISLAMIC!!! (Please See #3 for how this actually is Islamic.)

6. Apparently girls’ education is something Western. Hmm… seeing as girls only started being educated past the age of about 14 in the last 100 years, I’m guessing that the Taleban at the moment is only about 100 years behind us in that department. Mehh…. fail.

Amongst my various friends and colleagues, I appear to be in the minority on this latest inducement or “honey” by the CIA in order to cultivate good relations with Afghans in the tribal regions of the country. Much to their unadulterated horror, as my feminist manifesto resembles more of a Victorian’s feminism rather than the Second Wave, I agree with the CIA. Why do I agree with them? Let’s make a list.

I have no problem with using Little Blue Jinn to get information on Taliban movements or insurgencies in Afghanistan because…

1. You get information on Taliban and Insurgent movements in the tribal areas and provinces outside of Kabul. The fact of the matter is, is that flashy jewelry, new accoutrements, guns, etc. only lead to more violence. Further, I’m basically for anything that will prevent Islam being further bastardised by the Taliban who would not know what Islam was if it lit up a pair of sparklers and tapdanced naked on the peaks of Tora Bora.

2. Sexual pleasure is a right in Islam. There is nothing in the Qur’an or Sunnah that says that you cannot have anything to help sexual enhancement. In fact, sexual pleasure is one of the most important rights for women. A man with four wives has to be able to treat his wives equally both in love, caring, and sex.

3. Sexual prowess is something that gives power. Progeny = Power. Sons = Power. Afghans are not murdering their baby girls, the bigger their families are the more powerful a man is. It is not like this is some new phenomena in the world.

4. Sex is good for people. It is healthy. We are working on Afghan women’s maternal health, replacing limbs, and now sexual health. If it has side-effects towards helping anti-Taliban operations and restoring peace to Afghanistan? Make love and loads of it.

I am sure my list is overly simplistic, but the fact of the matter is that you cannot and should not apply ideas of sexual power that we find normative or combat in the West on the tribal provinces of rural Afghanistan. Imperialism comes in many forms, and yes, there is a kind of Feminist Imperialism that navigates some murky waters in Afghanistan. Let us try and work within a womanist, Muslim paradigm there and not one that is relevant to our campuses. The battles we are fighting at home are not the same battles fought abroad.

One of my favourite feeds that I get to my private blog is Muslimah Media Watch. On my hiatus this past semester from my blog, the ladies at MMW have augmented by Google Alerts and kept me posted on the goings-on in the media with Muslim women!

Check-out their site and their brilliant commentary. It is a refreshing look at Muslim women in the media.

x Jemima

A year has passed since I was sitting in my office at home over Christmas Break, checking my e-mail and sipping my coffee, when my Dad came upstairs and said, “They’ve killed Benazir. They’ve murdered Benazir Bhutto.” I remember looking at him with horror and disbelief and then I remember the tears. I sobbed for the entire day. The last, flickering light of hope for womankind and the last truly great woman leader of the Islamic World had shattered before our eyes. Murdered by nameless, faceless thugs in the crowd.

So now a year has passed. Pakistan and India are on the verge of destroying each other. The Northwest Frontier Province is in shambles. The Taliban are returning and the bloodlust that so many claim is “Islamic” flows faster and more furiously than before.

I do not know why I put so much hope into Benazir. I think it may be because in her I saw another woman, someone who was deeply flawed, yet hopeful. She embodied something to aspire to, a powerful woman at the forefront of global affairs. She was brave, courageous, and beautiful. She was also a mother. I wish again that I had met her. That I had known her even for a short time. I am consoled by the fact however that I know many other Benazirs, many women coming-up through the ranks, fighting and teething and kicking to bring peace, justice, and hope to their war weary nations.

And now a year later, I watch on television the shattering of Gaza. The breaking of another people without a beacon of hope. Crawling on the grass by the checkpoints eating grass, struggling to get to Bethlehem on Christmas Eve, and the slaughter of innocents returns again to Palestine. I cannot watch the news without crying. The streets are full of blood again thanks to Hamas and Israel who willingly and ably shed the blood of their citizens for what? For what all this blood?

New Year’s Resolution: Be better about your blog!!!

Check.

Where are the cookies?

x

Eid Mobarak, everyone! )

When I was interning at the Embassy of Afghanistan, my mentor and friend, M, asked me to write a report on girls’ education in Afghanistan for a larger project in the department. I started in 1995 and worked my way through to 2005. I poured through World Bank records, UN reports, and various other sites with information. I remember clearly that I had seen all of the statistics in about half an hour. Why? Because every statistic from 1995-2002 simply read as follows: … That was all, just: … Boys’ education was negligible as well, but at least they were in school. I asked M, how to I write about …? It was a conundrum that we never quite surmounted as other projects filtered in and news of girls’ education and projects improving started to come in from Afghanistan. I could at least hold on to the notion that … was steadily climbing upwards, but for how long?

My mummy e-mailed me today. She was so full of rage, tears and anger over what happened to those girls yesterday. As a woman who spent 30 years of her life working her way from a similar poverty to educating girls, she is outraged. She sees herself and her own struggles to receive an education. She sees her grandmother a woman who was sent at the age of five, taken out of her school in Galicia, Poland and sent to a German farm. She sees her Romani ancestors struggling for basic human rights. She is outraged and so am I. Every time I read another story of my beloved Afghanistan, I am torn between numbness and outrage. Why? Why do you keep doing this?

M also shared this hadith with me ages ago, when I was struggling with some Islamist banter on another blog that I moderate. She said to me, “The Prophet Muhammad once said that ‘the ink of the scholar is worth more than the blood of the martyr.’” Yesterday as I thought of M’s hadith, I also remembered that in that hadith, the Prophet Muhammad (pbuh) never specifies the gender of the scholar. Why?

Because Allah gave us the right to education.

Today is Election Day 2008! Get out there and Yalla VOTE! It does not matter who you vote for, vote for who your heart knows is the right person for the United States and for our relationship with the Islamic World!

Polls open at 6.00 AM and close at 8.00 PM so get out there and do your thing!!! I’ll see you all bright and early at the polling stations!

YALLA VOTE!

xxx Jemima

Zoha Really Deserves a Second Joke - R. Stevens