I got this video as a forward from several people. Apparently, a mouse was spotted in the meat display section at Carrefour in City Mall Amman. I can’t say this is the precise location of the video, but the people around do talk Jordanian. One man is telling the employee in the video “Oh no we WILL videotape this, because we are paying money in this place.”
Download the clip here:
MouseCarrefour
In a continuation of the ancient practice of wa’d (a practice of pagan Arabs before Islam whereby they buried living newborn female babies in the desert to avoid future scandals stemming from these females’ dishonoring them when they’re adults), honor crimes still occur today in Jordan, Palestine, Syria, and Iraq. The practice is thus still alive and well, because the aim of killing a female in both wa’d and honor crimes is to preserve family honor. A loose concept with burdens carried by women and privileges enjoyed by men.
For Abdel-Qader Ali there is only one regret: that he did not kill his daughter at birth. ‘If I had realised then what she would become, I would have killed her the instant her mother delivered her,’ he said with no trace of remorse.
Two weeks after The Observer revealed the shocking story of Rand Abdel-Qader, 17, murdered because of her infatuation with a British soldier in Basra, southern Iraq, her father is defiant. Sitting in the front garden of his well-kept home in the city’s Al-Fursi district, he remains a free man, despite having stamped on, suffocated and then stabbed his student daughter to death.
Abdel-Qader, 46, a government employee, was initially arrested but released after two hours. Astonishingly, he said, police congratulated him on what he had done. ‘They are men and know what honour is,’ he said.
‘Death was the least she deserved,’ said Abdel-Qader. ‘I don’t regret it. I had the support of all my friends who are fathers, like me, and know what she did was unacceptable to any Muslim that honours his religion,’ he said.
He said his daughter’s ‘bad genes were passed on from her mother’. Rand’s mother, 41, remains in hiding after divorcing her husband in the immediate aftermath of the killing, living in fear of retribution from his family. She also still bears the scars of the severe beating he inflicted on her, breaking her arm in the process, when she told him she was going. ‘They cannot accept me leaving him. When I first left I went to a cousin’s home, but every day they were delivering notes to my door saying I was a prostitute and deserved the same death as Rand,’ she said.
‘She was killed by animals. Every night when go to bed I remember the face of Rand calling for help while her father and brothers ended her life,’ she said, tears streaming down her face.
- The Guardian:Read the full story here
Bad genes always seem to come from the mother’s side in this part of the world. A mother or a sister is automatically a partner in crime when a female family member is a suspect, she receives similar punishment and is condemned without question. Yet it is the men who rape and kill, the men who think they’re entitled not only to a woman’s body but also to her soul, the men who deny the right of life or grant the privilege of servitude in the name of tradition or religion. Doesn’t that make you wonder who really has the bad genes? By Allah!
Sitting down, I gather my limbs closer to my body and wonder “has it been that long already?”. A year has passed since that trip in my car towards Fuhais, 12 whole months passed carrying with them more change than I ever imagined possible, yet no change at all. The thought makes me nauseous. Is this how I will feel 10 years down the road? Probably. I always ask the same questions one way or the other, mainly because nobody ever answers me. The process is a futile cliché but I can’t escape it. I think I even love it.
The issue at hand is not the past, but the future. The past I leave to another mood, the future fills me with pessimism and anticipation at the same time. I want to know what happens, like when you watch a good movie and want to know how it ends. The trouble is that this is not a movie, the people are not fictional characters, and at the end of the drama I will cease to be. I will not be able to even record my own impressions of it or my evaluation of its artistic merit. Isn’t that sad? Entirely. It’s a pathetic anticlimax. You’re almost there…but not quite.
I am looking forward to a number of things this summer. One of them is the pool. The other is a mosaic class in no other than ancient Madaba. The third thing is a job interview which might lead me to something I have always imagined I would be good at (the truth of this speculation remains to be discovered.) And finally, a trip. A trip away from the hypocrisy of Amman, away from its dry and dusty summer heat, away from the people who stare and criticize. I will move away albeit temporarily, to a better world. Somewhere where I can relax and be myself without apprehension. I really shouldn’t have said “finally,” because there are other things awaiting me this summer; things I can’t disclose.
Books also await. Mostly fiction. I’ve become an ultra-avid reader this year, it seems frustration pushes me to seek refuge in the words of people I can’t converse with. I also have an exam at one point in the summer. And my birthday — that anniversary of the start of my life, relatively inconsequential and out of control as it is, the episodes that cast me as their lead character even when I choose not to. All of this, and more — I have no doubt about it, will happen this summer. Nothing according to plan though. Isn’t that ironic?
Something absolutely absurd just happened in my flickr photo stream. I haven’t been using flickr since last July, and switched to Picasa after flickr wouldn’t accept my online payment to become a pro member. I am too sensitive when online applications are concerned and can’t handle rejection, so I dumped flickr (or was it the other way around?).
So a few minutes ago I decided to post a couple of pictures to flickr just for fun. When the uploading process finished, I gasped for breath at the sight of one of my private pictures uploaded by mistake! The HORROR! I panicked, cursed repeatedly under my breath, and decided to immediately delete the picture and forget this episode ever happened. I figured there is no way anyone could have seen the picture because it had been uploaded only seconds earlier. I rushed to click “delete” but found a little surprise waiting for me: a comment on the picture from one of my contacts. ALREADY!
Damage control: delete the picture, send commenter email denying anything to do with it, and sign with “what happens in my flickr, stays in my flickr.” I should have added “I know where you live. I live where you live.” …me and my stupid little black dress vs. flickr adventures. Ugh.
Right about now, I was supposed to be at the University of Jordan’s Center of Strategic Studies presenting my opinions on “The Internet and Socio-Political Life in Jordan,” conveniently the title of the workshop I was invited to participate in. Obviously, I did not attend.
The reason I did not attend was primarily to preserve my partial-anonymity. The invite came in my nickname “Tololy,” which was something I found very interesting because there I was, receiving an official invite not in my official name but in the name I chose for myself. I thought this was a very interesting alteration of traditional boundaries (call yourself a name long enough and you will get official invites from institutions addressing you by it).
As I was saying, I wanted to preserve my anonymity by not attending. I normally respond to emails asking for my opinions on issues, and I even meet up with people whose cyber-personalities interest me, and many people who read this blog know me either in person or at least know my actual name. Therefore, my anonymity is a puzzling concept; very blurry around the edges.
However, this invite to appear in person in front of a crowd and introduce myself as “Tololy” was definitely a break in my cyber-life routine. It meant that I would have had to discuss issues with people who saw me right there in front of them but did not know my name, indeed, could not know my name. The situation as I imagined it in my head would have been bizarre, or at least pretty uncomfortable.
This is one disadvantage of being anonymous online. It is easily surmounted by temporarily revealing your true identity in such occasions, a thing I would have done had I not been entirely busy today and technically unable to attend that workshop. So, yes, there were other reasons why I did not attend. But for future reference, I will have to design a way to appear in person in speaking-engagements without trespassing on my anonymity. Speaking-cat hologram maybe?
I am still alive. Just positively busy, and thinking of something to write about.
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| From Give Me Nails… |
My car’s bumper sticker reads:
It was either that or this:
And I’m not a fruitcake. So all risks considered, I went for the disgusting, unrefined, but humorous, attitude involving mucus. I’m real classy like that.
Heaven’s Steps blogger Hadeel has passed away. I never read her blog, never knew what she stood for, and never heard of her before today. Upon her death, Bloggers Observatory announced the news and eulogized her. This made me go check out her blog, read what she wrote, and get to know this now-deceased blogger whose last post was just last month. She died very suddenly. I’m guessing she was young too.
Maybe because this is a blogger, female, Arab, and young that I feel sorry that she has passed away. Maybe it’s because she represents parts of me that the news is so shocking even though I never read what she wrote before today. But all of this has brought this question to my mind: What do you think should happen to the blog when the blogger passes away? How will the readers know their daily thought supplier has died? Any ideas?
For as long as I can remember, the name Dr.Nawal Saadawi equaled nothing more than an old hag who preached immorality and social dysfunctions. That was (is) how my family saw Saadawi, and consequently that was how I saw her too.
From the bits and pieces I heard infrequently about her, she wanted to “liberate women and corrupt society,” and demanded things like “calling a child by its mother’s name” and “abandoning the veil.” These her points of view were quickly linked to her physical appearance, words like “masculinized woman” and “old bitch” were invariably linked to her ideas and effectively stripped them of any validity somehow. Why is it that a female thinker is seen as a masculinized woman and her hair color and texture are brought up in a discussion of her ideas?
I never bothered to investigate Saadawi because I thought I had her figured out through what everyone thought of her. Gradually, though, as I started to grow out of what-everyone-else-thinks bubble I began to understand what I had been missing out on, and it was a lot.
Just today I visited Saadawi’s official website where I discovered that this is an educated, intelligent woman who has written many books (fiction and non-fiction), has served her country and has tried to raise awareness against female genital mutilation. None of that was ever mentioned in any discussion of her that I witnessed. People only talked about her crazy hair and how she had no “shame” of going on TV and speaking against society and religion at her very old age. They had not been prepared for her discourse, so they focused their attention on throwing cheap shots at her hair and age.
I have never read anything by Saadawi (novels, plays,etc.) but I plan on looking for her writings and reading them (some are available on her website). As such, my attitude to date is based on internet materials I read from and about her. I am very impressed with her talking sense into people and suffering for her cause. She was put in jail, exiled, some lawyer tried to force her divorce from her husband through courts (where does that ever happen except in the Arab world?), and some other ultra-conservative lawyer in Egypt recently tried to deprive her of her Egyptian nationality on the basis that she mocked religion through a play of hers. Thankfully, logic triumphed and the latter case was dismissed by the court.
Saadawi’s ideas on women and the wellbeing of society are also impressive to me. In this BBC Q&A she answered people’s questions directly and cleared out some ambiguities created around her thought by the media. She said she is strongly opposed to female genital mutilation, she supports secularism and argues for the essential link between women’s rights in a society and its general wellbeing and progress — things that make sense if we only reflect on them.
I find it scandalous how many religious people fabricate lies around a single woman’s thoughts instead of taking them into consideration. For this reason, I will read more about Saadawi now that I know she makes sense, and I will learn her opinions and hope they spread far and wide, because we need them now more than ever.
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