Gigglefit, Reading The Waves

The waves of the sea “like turbaned warriors, like turbaned men with poisoned assegais who, whirling their arms on high, advance upon the feeding flocks, the white sheep.”

Reading Woolf and giggling. Don't generally go hand in hand.

Voting on Minarets in Switzerland

Swiss nationals are voting on whether to ban the building of minarets on the country's mosques.

Muslims make up about 6 percent of Switzerland, where there are currently four minarets. Not quite as many as the army of minaret-missiles on the anti-minaret posters. But, says Ulrich Schlüer of the rightwing Swiss People's party, why wait till you can't see the white cross on the flag for the forest of black minarets?

This either/or, it is draining. But, aesthetically speaking, very cleverly depicted.

Schlüer argues that the minaret has got nothing to do with religion. But, simultaneously, it seems that minarets are the first stage to the introduction of sharia law.

First they build a tower, and then, you see, they ban bacon. Also, FYI, architectural structures conduct forced marriages.

"Forced marriages and other things like cemeteries separating the pure and impure - we don't have that in Switzerland, and we do not want to introduce it."

Oh and Julia Onken believes "mosques are male houses, minarets are male power symbols...the building of minarets is also a visible signal of the state's acceptance of the oppression of women."

I. Well. How logical. Perhaps we need a more extensive ban, to fully eradicate male power symbol architecture?

Eid Mubarak

Postcolonial And Diasporic Representations Of Muslim Women

Westernised Women & Silenced Ciphers:

Postcolonial And Diasporic Representations Of Muslim Women

Essay published in Outskirts.

"The fight against terrorism is also a fight for the rights and dignity of women."

- Laura Bush

On August 26, 2000 the New York Times reported on Asiyah Andrabi, a “conservative Muslim and radical feminist” who “makes her demands for equal rights for women from behind the all-enveloping burqa.” Andrabi, who is also described as a militant fighting for the liberation of Kashmir, seems to compound what the writer evidently sees as the irreconcilable contradiction between feminism and Islam, women’s rights and the veil, Muslim women and militancy. The representation of Muslim women as militant or potentially violent is rare. The idea of Islam as threatening is usually reserved for Muslim men, while women are perceived as an object of pity or empathy. Underlying Laura Bush’s statement is this more familiar paradigm of women as victims of fundamentalist Islamic tradition, implicitly brown women in need of rescue by civilized people throughout the world.

This paper examines representations of Muslim women, looking at the way interpretations of the Muslim woman are often limited to what is seen as the symbolic and ideological aspect of their presence in the texts, and examining the wider question of the veil, which unavoidably enters the realms of religious debate, cultural theory and literary criticism. It will focus primarily on two texts which can be classified as postcolonial: Hanif Kureishi’s The Black Album (BA) and Ama Ata Aidoo’s Changes: A Love Story. In studying these texts and their representation of Muslim women, I am concerned not so much with the concept of "writing back" which is often a common theme in post-colonial discourse but with the way both writers speak out of and to their respective audiences.

On the one hand, Aidoo’s ironically titled novel, as has often been noted, is in fact a discourse on the complexities of the positions and lives of members of the Ghana’s neo-colonial elite, (Odamtten: 1994: 161) while Kureishi writes not as a postcolonial subject displaced in Britain but “as a British subject in a post-colonial world trying to contest and displace the dominant narrative of the nation.” (Williams: 1999: 10) I have chosen to focus on two Muslim female characters represented in these two very different texts who both play a secondary part in the plot, yet whose presence in the text is nevertheless central to both novels.

(Rest of the Essay)

Algeria vs Egypt

So everyone is watching the match, and I have been drawn inexorably into it, to the extent that I'm now watching football and listening to the French commentary on Algerian TV, because its raining here and the Egyptian channel is a mass of violent colors.

Which is not altogether inappropriate, considering the violence that "flared" days and days before the match and has continued to "flare" since, online and offline. You would think it would not be possible to despair more over the state of Arab disunity, but it seems some people are determined to prove otherwise.

I am not a football fan at all. But I can understand the football obsession, even if I can't fully relate to it. I was in Cairo when Egypt won the African cup. It was a quite spectacularly unforgettable night.

Wahed Sefr got that part right. So maybe it takes people's minds of the dreariness of day to day, and maybe it is about much more than nationalism.

But now its just ridiculous. Whoever wins the match, I think what will last longer in people's memory is the fiasco of what occured before it.

http://egyptianchronicles.blogspot.com/2009/11/game-night.html

http://egyptianchronicles.blogspot.com/2009/11/hats-off-mekki.html

Jamal Dajani on the Fort Hood Story

Don't Ask Me About Hasan

"Hey, Jamal...sorry to disturb you so early. But you know the Hasan story is big, and I was wondering if you're willing to come for an interview and talk about how it feels being a Maahzlem (Muslim) and all," a television producer says to me on my cell, while I was driving to work.

"How did you feel being a Christian, with Timothy McVeigh and Adolf Hitler being Christians?" I fired back.

Crane Your Neck to See the Sky

'Rogue' Afghan Policeman

Five British soldiers have been shot dead by a "rogue Afghan policeman."

Parenthetically, somewhere far below the masses of restrained recriminating text: Two Afghan police are also believed to have been killed. (Or, as it may be, three, we don't really know)

Reporting on the facts and responses to the facts are peppered with head-shaking over Afghan govt incompetence and Afghan police uselessness, amid analytical re-enactments and objectivity-laden emotion. I don't understand the convolutions of attempting neutrality. I really don't.

And now everyone has to focus very very carefully on the word "rogue" because why would an Afghan harbor ill-will towards British troops? The motive for this one, it's a real puzzler.

"Sources close to the investigation said Gulbaddin may have been high on heroin at the time of the attack. It has been suggested the killer may have had links to the Taleban. There are also suggestions that he had animosity towards his superiors after being repeatedly moved around the country as part of his duties."

So. Our "rogue Afghan policeman" is either a) a junkie b) a lazy native who didn't appreciate having duties, or c) a terrorist, in which case see d) the general uselessness of the Afghan govt which can't stop infilitrators infilitrating into their poorly educated, notoriously corrupt police force.

Yes, we are in a post-imperial age.

Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time

Another appalling video game movie. Xena meets Alladin by way of Tomb Raider, only Gemma Arterton's voice-over accomplishes the feat of being even more annoying than Lara Croft's accent.

Which, perfectly sensical. Over the top British accents, never ever out of place if you're talking ancient/foreign. (The prince in the game had a British accent. So. Yeah, extremely authentic.)

I do accept the wisdom and inevitability of Hollywood's marker for all things foreign, the neutral space for your imagination to supply authenticity. But: "We must take the dagger to the secret guardian temple!" Seriously? That is just toe-curlingly cringe-worthy.

And this appalling Disney misadventure is taken seriously enough that there are yelps of "white-washing!", followed by casting suggestions of ethnic-looking people and/or recommendations of contacts and tanning.

Also: Aryan Iranians (excuse me, Persians) harping on about their Caucasianness, and Iranians rolling their eyes at said Aryans, and the dawning awareness that Hollywood mentality makes blue-eyed Persian princes the flip-side of 300.

Prince of Persia was the first game I ever played. Now I will never be able to play it without feeling nauseous.

Al Jazeera's 13th Birthday

Al Jazeera 13th Anniversary will apparently be accompanied by a make-over of the Arabic channel, which is in desperately dire need of change. Ever since someone decided to loose all sense of aesthetics and arabesques for the busy-ness of a CNN type glarish clash of colours, it's all gone more than a little random.

Content over appearance and all, but I have a conspiracy theory that Al Arabiya's viewers may be drawn there as a result of its colour-coded matchiness and restfully mesmerising purple. The expensive graphics may also be a factor. Al Jazeera Arabic has needed more funding for a long long time.

When it first launched in 1996, Jazeera was the only independent 24 hour news channel in the Arab world. It is still the most watched. The channel's appearance should be up to the standard of the reporting. And they really need the new programmes that will apparently be coming.

(I am still bemoaning the loss of Siri Lil ghaya and Yu7ka Ana)

So. Let's hope the relaunch does it justice.