Politics

This year, two notable controversies have been brewing in Tennessee: a proposed bill that would forbid educators from using the word “gay” in the classroom, and a court battle to determine whether or not Islam is a religion. (The verdict? Islam is in fact a religion—for now, anyway.)

For three weeks, time was at a standstill. I wandered the streets aimlessly, sometimes walking into a park that I used to visit with Saadia when I was younger. What else could I do? Those almond eyes, they burned through my memories. I don’t know how AQI knew, but they called a few days later. My mother pleaded and cried. She asked me to think about what I was doing, what I was doing to my family. How could this help Saadia? What was I proving?

I despise sheer dogmatism, the type of ideological blindness you see in those Greenpeace activists on college campuses, who try to persuade you to donate 20 dollars a month to their environmental causes, or tell you the merits of recycling your garbage, as if that will make all the fucking pollution of the world go away. There are some things that are worth fighting for, those things which really probe deep into the consciousness of man, the things that shape you, make you, define you.

Muslim women rarely talk about sex in public. To do so is considered by the cultures they inhabit – not by Islam – as one of the great taboos. So what on earth possessed Salwa al Mutairi, a failed politician from Kuwait, to declare that female “sex-slaves” were a solution to meet the needs of lusty Kuwaiti husbands?

While researching my novel, Lyrics Alley set in 1950s Sudan, I came across the story of a promising schoolgirl whose older brother refused to let her wear a much needed pair of glasses. No matter that being short-sighted would hamper her studies, in pre-Independent Sudan reading glasses were considered to be masculine and disfiguring. Being short-sighted myself, I warmed to this story. In the mid-seventies, at the age of ten, my English teacher had caught me squinting at the board and called my mother in.

There’s a thin line between sex and politics, and it is nonsense to keep repeating the mantra that Egypt’s revolution “wasn’t about gender”. What revolution worth its salt can be fuelled by demands of freedom and dignity and not have gender nestled in its beating heart – especially in a country replete with misogyny, religious fundamentalism (of both the Islamic and Christian kind) and which for 60 years has chafed under a hybrid of military-police rule?

With all the recent media coverage of women not being permitted to drive in a certain Middle Eastern country, I got thinking – what would it be like if men weren’t allowed to drive? I came to one simple conclusion: we women would be much safer. Think about the dangers of male drivers. Men have higher rates of speeding, they are involved in more accidents and cause more deaths on the road. Their high-testosterone brains ignite higher incidences of road rage. They are notorious tailgaters, failing to observe any measure of safe stopping distance. And, they can’t even be bothered to ask directions when lost.

Women played an interesting role in the account of the final hours of Osama Bin Laden’s life. Three wives, as well as nine of his children, lived in the compound where he was killed, along with the families of two Pakistani brothers. Initially, it was erroneously reported that Bin Laden had used one of his wives as a human shield. However, as we began to learn more about the compound in Abbottabad and the events that made it so famous, one of the most discussed members of Bin Laden’s family quickly became Amal Ahmed al-Sadah.

Like millions, I’ve been mesmerized by humanitarian Greg Mortenson’s story of compassion, commitment and courage. Like so many, I am heartbroken by everything that I am reading about the current controversy. The accusations against Greg are serious and the allegations of his community-based education organisation Central Asia Institute’s (CAI) financial mismanagement are troubling. Managing people’s donations, from pennies to millions, is a responsibility that should never be taken lightly.