I am completely sickened this morning after reading a number of things in the papers and other places online. Here is a tour of my revulsion:

1- Human Rights Watch published a report on the situation of Saudi Arabian women. The report argued, and correctly, that these women are systematically kept in childhood as by requiring guardianship and their guardians’ approval of every step they take in their adult lives (education, work, child caring, travel, etc.) while at the same time the socio-religious system held them legally accountable for their actions as true and actual adults. Most importantly, the report mentioned that women are portrayed and treated as fitna, sources of strife and moral decay, if they are allowed any share of public life or exposure.

This same treatment of women as the sources of malice lays the foundation for the belief that men, their supposed polar opposites, are gullible and easily swayed into vice. Indeed, it argues that for men to stay virtuous, women must be covered up and must not come in direct contact with any men outside their close familial circles lest all social and moral stability come crumbling down. The mere idea that men cannot control their sexual urges, which are oh so easily aroused at the sight of a woman’s ankle or at the scent of her perfume, is absolutely offensive to me and I am not even a man. It pictures men as horny animals and women as their helpless prey, and, ironically, it puts the burden of sustaining society at the shoulders of these prey.

What I have observed is that these arrangements, though meaning well in an incredibly skewed way, actually encourage vice rather than suppress it. Is it not vice that Saudi men seek when they visit Jordan, Syria, or Lebanon in the summer? Is it not vice that Saudi women must be in the company of foreign drivers in order for them to go places? Is it not vice that even women clad in black from head to toe do not escape sexual harassment in the form of pickup lines or phone numbers on small pieces of paper, or bluetooth messages sent to their mobiles, and this does happen in Saudi Arabia because the basic human desire to interact with others, male and female, is not satisfied? Is it not vice that women are placed entirely under the mercy of their male guardians in each and every aspect of their lives? Is it not vice that a human being can die and not be missed by authorities or relatives because she has no ID and only a select few can see her anyway? Is it not vice that the kingdom of hypocrisy imposes strict and sick faith on a number of people, I would argue mostly the women, while it lets others enjoy alcohol, sex, and drugs behind closed doors inside or openly in other countries?

A friend of mine brought it to my attention that the HRW report was funded by a number of Jewish organizations. I think that is significant but it does not change the reality of the situation conveyed in the report. I suppose HRW, like my friend said, should be more selective of its sources of funding especially in these types of reports. Simply put, these fishy sources of money only contribute to discrediting the reports by the Arab public, which is quite the contrary of what they hope to achieve.

2- Allah is everywhere. I read a couple of articles in Al Ghad newspaper today, one was about secularism in an Islamic context, and the other about islamophobia. What struck me as absolutely one-dimensional was the content of the two comments posted on these pages. The commenters contended the ideas present in the articles by invoking the holier-than-thou authority of Quranic and Hadith citations.

In the first article, a commenter argued that a Muslim cannot possibly live under any law except that of Islam, and yet he provided that he lives in Jordan. I don’t know about you, but I see an amazing paradox because Jordanian laws are not,for the most part, Islamic, but secular (and let’s thank whoever it is that runs the show for not letting the Muslim Brothers rule us, amen). Then in the other comment on the second article, the commenter called for a return to the Arabic language in deriving terms instead of arabizing foreign terms, and he cited the Quran as a linguistic miracle. Fine, that is a worthy cause, but please CUT THE CRAP and stop preaching from a pedestal just because you were born into a Muslim family. Did the Arabs have no culture, no language, no identity, before the Quran was born? They did, and they better stop crying over spilled milk and get their act together already.

3- A number of distinguished college students at Al Balqa Aplied University discovered that they had been awarded scholarships by the Ministry of Higher Education, of which their university did not inform them. They made the discovery only lately, while the scholarships were awarded a year or two ago.

In a string of corruption and embezzlement scandals, Al Balqa Applied University seems to have outdone itself this time. The students will be awarded the monetary equivalent of the scholarships, officials said. But nobody commented on WHERE the money was exactly, or WHERE it would have gone had not a random student discovered this theft-corruption affair by accident while applying to another scholarship which he was denied because, hey, didn’t he know he had been awarded one two years ago? I want to see people put on trial for this. I want to see the big heads at Al Balqa University pay a price for their negligence and downright corruption. Will anyone do anything though or will they pacify the public with tales about compensating the students? We must never forget that there will be other students in the future who will be robbed of their scholarships to fatten the pockets of a person or two at Al Balqa Applied University.

4- Oy! Caramba! Nasser Judeh says relax, we didn’t sell the port you idiots, we sold the LAND. Wtf does that mean? Can someone translate it to me? Also, what does he mean when he talks about the Dead Sea Casino deal that “there was no sign of corruption, and the government and the investor agreed to exclude establishing a casino from the deal”? If it’s a “deal,” then there has to be SOMETHING in it for the investor, no? Otherwise what is he and the government agreeing upon? Let’s play a guessing game: it’s not a casino, what oh what could it be? Oh I know! Expanses of land in the Dead Sea area and in Shafa Badran in Amman. That way the government avails itself of the sin of agreeing to build a casino, a vice-house, on the holy lands of Jordan, and it also PAYS land-money to the investor at the expense of homeless and hungry, but entirely pious, Jordanians. I wonder why Judeh did not mention the one billion$$ worth of land that we are forking over to said investor at NO GAIN, and how he cites “complete transparency” at the same time. Does anyone else smell shit?

5- The Jordan Times will not be published on Monday April 28th due to Easter Holiday. As far as I can tell, newspapers run as usual on holidays. News still HAPPEN on holidays. The world does not simply stop because Jesus decides to rise.

6- Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves: “Under the measures, which came in response to Royal directives, around 40 essential commodities were exempted from customs duties and sales tax, while taxes on nonessential items like alcohol, tobacco, video games and satellite receivers were raised.” What 40 “essential” commodities have been exempted, I beg to know. How come they are never enumerated and explicitly indicated in such accounts? And how are alcohol and cigarettes and video games and satellite receivers not essential to us who are beaten down every day and find no console in a greedy system? At least neshrab meshan nensa, kill ourselves slowly with smoke, and indulge in HotBird fantasies. Give us that at least!

There’s still more where that came from. But I don’t feel like devoting any more of my time to this upsetting state of affairs. I do hope though, that the person who argued not so long ago that “Jordan isn’t so bad a country, and I want to live there,” would read this and be forewarned: be a rich foreigner in Jordan or an expatriated Jordanian abroad, and you will SWEAR by Jordan. Otherwise, run for your life.

In this Durkheim’s mechanical society, it is almost impossible to argue and be heard, or to pose a question and escape condemnation. You can never bring forth a new idea, nay, an old idea that marginally swerves away from the norm, and except it to be received by people who think critically and argue objectively. You will have to spend years, thousands of words, sanity and faith in the human race, even blood if you’re so inclined, and they will not listen.

It’s the transition to novel lands that frightens them. Tradition is safe, it’s been explored prior and it’s all predictable and stable and it works to a degree. But these new ideas, shame on you for introducing them. Shame on you for urging them to think and reconsider. You disagree? Who do you think you are? Who are you to defy ages-old, tried and true tradition?

But wasn’t novelty what propelled human advancement? Or was that also decreed by divinity and tradition? Isn’t trial and error the way we express our godliness, without attributing it to a myth? What about the supposed anomalies that add more value to the human experience than do these traditionalists? They mean nothing. Who’s going to hell now, my devil and me, or you?

Cast not your pearls before swine.

Anne Applebaum of Slate wrote an article discussing the hijab issue in Turkey and the recent attempt to sue the not-sufficiently-secular government that has unbanned it in public universities. I wrote about this before, arguing that no government has the right to dictate citizens’ fashions, and I was jubilant when hijab was unbanned, and I still am.

If you read Applebaum’s article, and you must in order to understand this post, you will find that she has practiced deliberate picking and choosing for arguments, quotations, and situations to suit her point, all the while neglecting to show counterarguments which are equally, if not more, valid. This sort of calculated coverage is not only biased, but extremely harmful as it leads recipients to form an impression which is on the whole charged with bias and twisted facts.

Then she referred to Muslim women as ‘Islamic‘ women. What is that? Is the English dictionary so vast and diversified so as to equate Muslim with Islamic now, and later with Islamicist with fascist with terrorist? Evidently, these subtle(!) and gradual substitutions serve a political goal to fragment and demonize. Applebaum certainly had an agenda writing her article, and her very choice of words reveals it.

According to the article, the “enduring significance” of the hijab is striking. Really? Is it any more “enduring” than the significance of Jesus or the Holy Trinity, the Yarmulke, or karma in Hinduism? Simply put, people will always carry out parts or all of what their religious beliefs dictate. Other people may feel threatened by that, and that’s the politics of it.

Applebaum laments her “Anglo-American bias” which so naively portrays the veil as a choice, then she proceeds to argue that “Fairly or not, in certain Turkish communities, a head covering in fact marks the wearer not just as faithful but as a believer in a particular version of Islam. Fairly or not, the head scarf carries with it, at least in Turkey, partisan connotations, as well as a suggestion of the wearer’s views of women.” As a woman living in a predominately Muslim country, and who is directly exposed to hijab, I opt for the ‘Not Fairly’ bit in Applebaum’s argument. An outsider may never learn the inner workings of a society as diversified and complex as Turkey, and to blindly support forceful implementation of secularism on the expense of basic human rights is to demolish any ‘liberal’ affiliations one claims to have.

She also hints, not so implicitly, that veiled Turkish women are less achieving than non veiled ones. “Wives of the current Turkish political leadership wear head scarves, that most of them donned the scarves after their marriages, and that most of them never worked or studied again after they wed.You can see why women who want something different might feel threatened.” Hmm. That may be because they were BANNED from studying at public Turkish universities until recently, and what ever happened to Applebaum’s “Anglo-American bias” and “personal choice“?

This polarization of Turkish, and Muslim, women as ‘veiled = uneducated, underachieving’ and ‘not veiled = educated, overachieving’ betrays Applebaum’s attempt to conceal her biases. It is an indication that people who claim to be liberal do make the very mistakes that they try to avoid, they go to extremes to protect concepts like secularism and in doing so, endanger the values and liberties they fight for.

Applebaum’s xenophobia emerges at the very end of her ill-researched article when she says “And if, someday, this argument comes to our shores, let’s not be surprised by that. In the end, the head-scarf debate isn’t about a wisp of fabric but about the viability of secular Islam itself.” This reveals that it is more of a question of Us vs. Them than a question of basic liberties and expression. It is not about secular Islam per se, it is not about oppressed Muslim women forced to wear the veil, it is not about their education and career prospects, it is not even about Turkey, for crying out loud! It is about the blatant fear of this argument coming to “our shores,” and that the free, liberal, advanced, educated, achieving West must be prepared to fight this ambiguous piece of cloth which conceals “The Other.”