Arab Flight Attendants

Monday's New York Times ran an article about Etihad's trailblazing female Arab flight attendants.

The article gushes about how states like Abu Dhabi offering "freedoms and opportunities nearly unimaginable elsewhere in the Middle East," but the catch is that the Emirates are offering these opportunities for other Arabs' daughters, not their own. All of the flight attendants mentioned in the article are from other, poorer places like Syria, Iraq, and Egypt. The Emirates are the cradle of sociological change for other Arab expats, but Emirati families remain staunchly conservative in most cases. They can be because they have the money to be. One wonders if the Emirates are fostering positive change that will eventually come around to their own country or simply causing problems for other societies.

Some highlights:

Flight attendants have become the public face of the new mobility for some young Arab women, just as they were the face of new freedoms for women in the United States in the 1950s and 1960s.

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In the midst of an Islamic revival across the Arab world that is largely being led by young people, gulf states like Abu Dhabi — which offer freedoms and opportunities nearly unimaginable elsewhere in the Middle East — have become an unlikely place of refuge for some young Arab women. And many say that the experience of living independently and working hard for high salaries has forever changed their ambitions and their beliefs about themselves, though it can also lead to a painful sense of alienation from their home countries and their families.
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Despite the increasing numbers of women moving to the gulf countries, the labor migration patterns of the last 20 years have left the Emirates with a male-female ratio that is more skewed than anywhere else in the world; in the 15-to-64 age group, there are more than 2.7 men for every woman.
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For many families, allowing a daughter to work, much less to travel overseas unaccompanied, may call her virtue into question and threaten her marriage prospects. Yet this culture is changing, said Musa Shteiwi, a sociologist at Jordan University in Amman. “We’re noticing more and more single women going to the gulf these days,” he said. “It’s still not exactly common, but over the last four or five years it’s become quite an observable phenomenon.”
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Young women whose work in the gulf supports an extended family often find, to their surprise and chagrin, that work has made them unsuitable for life within that family.
“A very good Syrian friend of mine decided to resign from the airline and go back home,” the Egyptian flight attendant said. “But she can’t tolerate living in a family house anymore. Her parents love her brother and put him first, and she’s never allowed out alone, even if it’s just to go and have a coffee.”
“It becomes very difficult to go home again,” she said.

Sickening

Washington Post reports on "Iraqi Women, Fighting for a Voice."

Some excerpts below. The one that stands out most comes first:

Rashid has received numerous death threats. In an e-mail, someone threatened to rape her for being un-Islamic.
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Hawjin Hama Rashid, a feisty journalist in bluejeans and a frilly blouse, had come to the morgue in this Kurdish city to research tribal killings of women. "A week doesn't pass without at least 10," the morgue director said, showing Rashid pictures of corpses on his computer screen.
First, a bloated, pummeled face.
Next, a red, shapeless, charred body. "Raped, then burned," the director said.
Then, another face, eyes half-closed, stab wounds below her neck.
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From the southern port city of Basra to bustling Irbil in northern Iraq, Iraqi activists are trying to counter the rising influence of religious fundamentalists and tribal chieftains who have insisted that women wear the veil, prevented girls from receiving education and sanctioned killings of women accused of besmirching their family's honor.
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"Without changing the way society thinks, changing laws on paper is useless," Rashid said.
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Since the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, satellite television, cellphones and Internet access have deepened the West's imprint on the relatively stable Kurdish region of Iraq, known as Kurdistan. Today, many urban women wear Western clothes and eschew Islamic head scarves. Women make up more than a quarter of the regional parliament.
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In the first six months of this year, 206 women were killed in Kurdistan, 150 of them burned to death. The killings were up 30 percent from the previous six months, according to the Kurdish regional government's Human Rights Ministry. Activists say many honor crimes go unreported or are portrayed as accidents. They also say that some women have immolated themselves out of despair.
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"We're still suffering from the past," said Jinan Q. Ali, the minister of women's affairs in the Kurdish regional government. "You can't say the government and police are not doing their job. To transfer a society from a violent one to a peaceful one won't happen suddenly."
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Last year, Saud also visited morgues to tabulate the number of women killed in Basra for a report to Iraq's parliament. She found 150 victims. She said she had known three of them: Maysoon was killed with her brother, both shot five times in the head for being Christians; gunmen killed Lubna for walking a little too close to her fiance; Sabah was murdered in a market for not wearing a head scarf.
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Saud shakes hands with men in public. She refuses to wear a head scarf, which she views as a symbol of submission. She wears a shawl only because her family fears for her life. But she is careful not to anger the religious conservatives who rule Basra.
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Anwar Indalel Shubbar, a local government official with the ultra-religious Fadhila Party said that women are entering "illegal relationships" if they have premarital sex and that honor killings are sanctioned by tribal laws.
"Our religion rejects the honor killings, but we can't stop the habits and traditions we have inherited," Shubbar said. She said she favors the imposition of Islamic law.
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Even the biggest victory of Iraqi women is bittersweet: A quarter of all seats in Iraq's parliament are constitutionally required to be filled by women. But out of 25 committees, only two are led by women. And most female lawmakers belong to the ruling religious parties. "It's all abayas and female mullahs," Saud said.
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A day after her visit to the morgue in Irbil, Rashid interviewed a pale 17-year-old inside a women's prison. Eyes clouding with tears, the teenager recounted her romance with a young man. Her relatives had accused her of dishonoring her family and tribe; her brother had tried to kill her to restore that honor. She had taken refuge here, behind walls topped with barbed wire.
A few days earlier, her father had offered to forgive her -- if she became the second wife of a relative old enough to be her grandfather. She refused.
"I know my family will kill me if I go back home," she told Rashid.

More on Arab Women

Octavia Nasr of CNN gave a report on women in the Arab media, arguing that the stereotypes of women seen in Arab soap operas do not square with their growing place in society.

Her report

A YouTube video posted by Jordan's Queen Rania on what Arab women are really up to.

Arab Pop Music Underworld

A major scandal is making headlines in the Arabic press and even making its way into the U.S. media. Lebanese pop diva Suzanne Tamim was murdered in July in a Dubai hotel. Yesterday, a prominent Egyptian businessman and member of parliament under the ruling National "Democratic" Party was arrested for contracting her murder. Hisham Talaat Mustafa reportedly paid $2 million for the murder of the star, with whom Hisham was romantically involved. He faces potential death by hanging or a life sentence if convicted under Egyptian law. You can read the details of the case here and here and in Arabic here, here, and here.

While female singers have been taken advantage of by rich men the world 'round, I cannot help but feel that there is a special misogyny that surrounds men of power in the Middle East. Alaa al-Aswani's novel "The Yacoubian Building" paints a pretty damning picture of this kind of man in Egypt. The sad thing is that there is a line of thinking that perpetuates such acts. Men cannot be expected to control themselves, so it is up to women to cover themselves and it is up to their families to protect them. If something happens to the woman, it is her fault and her family's fault for not keeping her from such a compromising situation. This is nonsense. Once men are held to greater account, much of the paranoid "protection" of women can be dispensed with because society will have generalized the norms that keep most men around the world from acting like animals. There will always be some exceptions, but the culture cannot go on allowing men to act like total savages while forcing the burden of civility upon the women. The problems of the current situation in some areas are made evident by the prosecution of rape victims in Saudi for being with a non-related male and such. The mindset even creeps into the thoughts of an Arab journalist, quoted in the LA Times article. Look at the words/phrases I've bolded and see the underlying thought process. While this man is not justifying the killing or anything of the sort, his words seem to shift a good deal of the moral burden into Suzanne's court.

Suzanne's whole life was a tragedy. She comes from a conservative Beiruti family which was totally against her singing in public. But she had a great voice and she was obsessed about singing. So she defied her society and decided to enter the world of music. . . . She was a beautiful woman. Her beauty maybe was a curse because she would turn men totally obsessed about her.

See in this last sentence how she is the actor (in a grammatical sense) "turning" men obsessed, rather than irresponsible, power-drunk, rich, greedy slobs making themselves obsessed over another plaything they could get their greasy, filthy hands on.