Politics

Last week, Mona Eltahawy triggered a polemic firestorm with her blanket assertion that Arab men’s hatred of women explains the abysmal gender inequities found in the Middle East. Many Arab women are perturbed that her article “Why Do They Hate Us?” in Foreign Policy has received so much attention while millions of women leaders throughout the Middle East are reduced to a footnote by Western media. These women are the unsung heroes in the trenches struggling to shed the yoke of patriarchy infiltrating the crevices of their lives.

Mona Eltahawy’s article, “Why Do They Hate Us?,” catalogues the abuses against women in the Middle East and demonstrates how Arab countries fall in the lowest levels of world’s standards. She awakens readers to one of many horrors; arguably, the most shocking of which is that 90 percent of married women in Egypt have had their genitals mutilated. Her sensational writing style goes right for the jugular, and it would have provoked a healthy dialogue in the Arab world had her article been published in an Arabic media outlet.

“Why Do They Hate Us,” asks Arab journalist, Mona Eltahawy, in her essay for Foreign Policy magazine. Eltahawy goes on to describe her perception of the treatment of women in the Arab world and ascribes all related mistreatment to systematic sociopolitical misogyny and patriarchy. The title of her essay is featured on the cover of the magazine with a photo of a nude woman painted in black with only her eyes showing, as if she were wearing a painted niqab and the caption under the title reads, “The real war on women is in the Middle East.”

Contrary to popular belief, Muslim women have served as revolutionary and heroic leaders. However, in recent years, due to the global socio-political climate, the phrase “Muslim woman” might conjure an image of a demure un-empowered woman sheltered by her burqa. Yet this image is not what our history records or what our present reflects. For example, the current Prime Ministers of Bangladesh (Sheikh Hasina Wazed) and Mali (Cissé Mariam Kaïdama Sidibé) are Muslim women. Similarly, the current President of Kosovo, Atife Jahjaga, is the world’s youngest female president, as well as her country’s first female Muslim president.

February 26, 2012 will forever be etched in the American psyche of race relations. Trayvon Martin, a 17-year-old African-American teenager, was shot to death on his way home from a convenience store — allegedly by a self-appointed neighborhood watchman by the name of George Zimmerman. His only crime was that he was Black and walking in a gated community in Sanford, Florida. His only possessions were a bag of Skittles and a can of ice tea.

Among the oddities of attending a large law school is that one can walk the same halls with someone for three years and never learn their name — that is, until Rush Limbaugh calls them a slut on national radio. Such was my introduction both to my classmate and to her views on the contraception debate taking place in Congress in recent weeks. Articles discussing the passage of a law that would force all employers to offer their employees health insurance plans that include birth control coverage can be found featured on the front pages of newspapers across the country.

Pakistan’s Shad Begum was among 10 of the world’s leading women activists the United States honoured on Thursday for their efforts to improve the lives of other women. Shad Begum of Lower Dir district, Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa, received the 2012 International Women of Courage Award, at a ceremony in Washington, for working for women in a deeply conservative area. The region was run briefly by the militants before the Pakistan Army cleared it in May 2009.