Women and the Democratization of the Middle East

Driving across town today I heard PBS’s To the Point discussion on women in the middle east. It is worth listening to.

Link
Audio Link

First Lady Laura Bush is just back from her good-will tour of the Middle East. Along with touting education in her speeches in Jordan, Israel and Egypt, she emphasized the importance of women’s roles in any democracy. In Afghanistan, women comprised 40% of the voters in the most recent elections. Just last week, women in Kuwait were granted the right to vote. Yet while many women in the Middle East are starting their own businesses, millions of others are seriously disadvantaged in education, healthcare and the justice system. Life is an often violent hardship. Guest host Diana Nyad speaks with social anthropologists, women’s advocates, activists, and a State Department coordinator who accompanied Mrs. Bush on her recent trip about democratization of the Middle East and the daily struggle for women there.

“What’s another name for pirate treasure?”


Heinrich Schliemann’s famous “Gold of Troy” at the Pushkin Museum’s “booty” exhibition.

NY Times’

None have been seen in public in more than 60 years. All are spoils of war, seized by Soviet troops from the ruins of Berlin in 1945 and carted back to Moscow. The exhibition – especially because of its timing – could easily be viewed as either a memorial to the ravages of war or as the taunt of a boastful victor.
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The most famous is a collection of gold known as Priam’s Treasure, recovered by the German archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann in 1873 in what he believed to be ancient Troy. The Pushkin displayed the treasures in 1996 and has since dropped any question of its return. The gold is back in storage.

Afghan Music Project

Adam Gouttierre and Chris Becherer, both MBA students at UC Berkeley, blogging about their trip to Afghanistan as a part of the Afghan Music Project (AMP). “The Afghan Music Project (AMP) is a social venture with the goal of raising the awareness of the beauty of traditional Afghan music and the tragic, but uplifting, story of Afghan women through a professionally recorded album. Proceeds from the AMP album will go towards funding educational scholarships for Afghan women.” Their blog entries have been extremely interesting so far (Link) – particularly as they talk about the impact of the Newsweek article (Link) and the rumored kidnapping of another westerner (Link).

Link
From boingboing.net

Pakistani Women Athletes Beaten Down by Islamists


Washington Post

LAHORE, Pakistan, May 14 — More than two dozen people were detained Saturday after taking part in a foot race that included women, defying a ban imposed after Islamic hard-liners had attacked participants in a similar event.
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Authorities banned women from competing in foot races after hard-liners, who regard women’s participation in sports as against Islam, attacked runners at a similar event in Punjab province last month.

Gulf Times

A Reuters photographer said police also beat and arrested protesters from Islamist parties who had planned to attack participants in the race.
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Among those arrested was group of female rights activists who attempted to lead a rally demanding for women the right to run in marathons alongside men.

Pakistan’s internationally known human rights activist Asma Jehangir was also arrested, witnesses said.

“The police surrounded Asma’s office and detained her as she came out of the office along with other participants,” witness Abdullah Iqbal said.

New York Times (login required)

Pakistani authorities had banned women from taking part in marathons last month after violent protests by hard-line Islamic parties. A marathon in Gujranwala, 85 miles south of Islamabad, in early April was attacked by a mob of Islamic extremists wielding batons and guns. Cross-fire between the police and the Islamists left 80 people injured.

The organizers of the run on Saturday said they wanted to highlight violence against women and protest against the increasing influence of Islamic extremist political parties.

James Opie on Afghanistan

I stumbled across this piece by the author James Opie.

Two basic streams of carpet designs can be identified in Afghanistan in the past several centuries. One is an urban design tradition of finely and precisely organized patterns, produced by professional carpet designers on the equivalent of graph paper. Given that weavings of this sort were produced in urban areas, this can be thought of as a “city” design tradition. Designs in such rugs are more formal, echoing Persian design influences.

Tribal designs represent a second and largely independent stream. Motives and patterns differ from tribe to tribe, depending very much on the traditions of the various groups and, to a lesser extent, on the inventiveness of the individual weavers. This second design stream of “tribal” rugs is the dominant one in Afghan weaving. An amalgam of the two streams can be found in certain workshop rugs that produced larger rugs with traditional tribal designs.

Afghan Women TV in Kabul

4-26-04

Afghan broadcasting authorities have just reserved a TV frequency for the Voice of Afghan Women association to open what is expected to be the first women’s community television channel in Kabul.

The registration fee has been paid thanks to a project of UNESCO’s International Programme for the Development of Communications (IPDC), which will also provide a transmitter with antenna and essential TV production equipment to the women’s association.

Good News


A first for Afghan women: the governor

It is not a job for the faint hearted. Afghan governors are stereotypically gruff, bearded men with a penchant for fighting, sweet tea and smoke-filled-room politics. Ms Sarobi, a mild-mannered mother, comes to work with a suitcase and her secretary.

Formerly the minister for women’s affairs, she said she had turned down an ambassadorial job to demand the governor’s post from President Hamid Karzai.
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In Bamiyan, Ms Sarobi’s popularity stems from a solid political pedigree (her uncle is a former vice-president) and partly from the liberalism of her fellow Hazara, one of Afghanistan’s more tolerant tribes.
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After the Taliban seized power in 1996, she fled to Pakistan so her daughter could continue school. She also detested the obligatory burka, but found the ankle-length cloak a useful disguise when, years later, she slipped back across the border to establish a clandestine network of girls’ schools.

The bad news…

Last week a woman in Badakhshan was stoned to death for adultery, the second such killing since the Taliban’s overthrow in 2001.

Motorbike

News and Art

• Police said a man on a motorbike shot dead a policeman who tried to prevent him from approaching an operation to destroy opium crops near Kandahar. Other officers then gunned down the motorcyclist.