Monthly Archives: April 2013

Tabsir Redux: Sahara, My, My, but its Dry

Egypt, Environment, Music and Dance, Orientalism

Vaudeville loved Orientalism. By the time Valentino played The Sheik, images of Middle Eastern scenes were well represented on stage and in music. Some of the lyrics from this time period are very clever. My personal favorite is a prohibition song from 1920 called “Sahara, We’ll Soon Be Dry Like You,” sung by the great comic singer Billy Murray. To hear this original 1920 recording in a digital format, click here.

Here are the words. Why not click above and sing along…


Sahara (We’ll Soon Be Dry Like You)
Words by Alfred Bryan, Music by Jean Schwartz

Verse 1: King Rameses went to pieces seven thousand years ago,
And pass’d a law that Egypt must go dry.
He took the liquors from the “shickers” all the way to Jericho,
But kept his little toddy on the sly.
The desert of Sahara flow’d with honey so they say,
Till prohibition came along and dried it up one day. Continue reading Tabsir Redux: Sahara, My, My, but its Dry →

Syria Has a Massive Rape Crisis

"Arab Spring", Ethics, Gender and Sexuality, Syria, Terrorism Issue

by Lauren Wolfe, The Atlantic, April 3

One day in the fall of 2012, Syrian government troops brought a young Free Syrian Army soldier’s fiancée, sisters, mother, and female neighbors to the Syrian prison in which he was being held. One by one, he said, they were raped in front of him.

The 18-year-old had been an FSA soldier for less than a month when he was picked up. Crying uncontrollably as he recounted his torture while in detention to a psychiatrist named Yassar Kanawati, he said he suffers from a spinal injury inflicted by his captors. The other men detained with him were all raped, he told the doctor. When Kanawati asked if he, too, was raped, he went silent.

Although most coverage of the Syrian civil war tends to focus on the fighting between the two sides, this war, like most, has a more insidious dimension: rape has been reportedly used widely as a tool of control, intimidation, and humiliation throughout the conflict. And its effects, while not always fatal, are creating a nation of traumatized survivors — everyone from the direct victims of the attacks to their children, who may have witnessed or been otherwise affected by what has been perpetrated on their relatives.

In September 2012, I was at the United Nations when Norwegian Foreign Minister Espen Barth Eide shook up a fluorescent-lit room of bored-looking bureaucrats by saying that what happened during the Bosnian war is “repeating itself right now in Syria.” He was referring to the rape of tens of thousands of women in that country in the 1990s.

“With every war and major conflict, as an international community we say ‘never again’ to mass rape,” said Nobel Laureate Jody Williams, who is co-chair of the International Campaign to Stop Rape & Gender Violence in Conflict. [Full disclosure: I’m on the advisory committee of the campaign.] “Yet, in Syria, as countless women are again finding the war waged on their bodies–we are again standing by and wringing our hands.”

We said after the Holocaust we’d never forget; we said it after Darfur. We probably said it after the mass rapes of Bosnia and Rwanda, but maybe that was more of a “we shouldn’t forget,” since there was so much global guilt that we just sort of sat back and let similar tragedies occur since and only came to the realization later — we forgot.

Could we have forgotten that the unfolding human catastrophe in Syria exists before it’s even over? Continue reading Syria Has a Massive Rape Crisis →

Islamic law in Syria: the Class of 1925-26

Islamic Law, Photography, Scholars, Syria


The graduating class surrounding their professors for the University of Syria’s Institute for Arabic Law in 1925-26; for a larger image, click here

The image above shows the graduating class from the University of Syria’s Institute for Arabic Law in 1925-26. Among the professors is Fath Allah ‘Ali Adibe (top row, second from right), a graduate of al-Azhar and the grandfather of Dr. Najwa Adra. He is in the minority of professors sporting beards, although the moustache was clearly a necessity and only one of the scholars has a bare head and he is one of the few with spectacles. What is fascinating is the representation of the students, who are dressed entirely in Western suit and tie. About half have their moustache intact, with one showing a handlebar worthy of a Viennese gentleman. School graduation pictures like these are priceless. Would it not be a worthy project for someone or some school to archive these for the Middle East? Any takers out there?


The professors for the University of Syria’s Institute for Arabic Law in 1925-26; for a larger image, click here

Whose body is it anyway?

"Arab Spring", Anthropology/Sociology, CyberOrient, Gender and Sexuality, Islamophobia

Last Thursday was dubbed “Topless Jihad Day,” a call by the feminist group FEMEN for women to protest in support of a Tunisian woman who posted photographs of herself topless (with remarks on her body that many would consider tasteless) on her Facebook site and soon received condemnation and calls for punishment. The result was hardly an outpouring of indigenous support like the “Arab Spring” that flooded the main squares of Tunis, Cairo and Sanaa. The FEMEN website has posted images of women baring their breasts in Rio de Janeiro, San Francisco, Montreal, Paris, Milan, Kiev, Brussels, Berlin and a few other major cities. Two things stand out about this day of protest. First, it takes place only in cosmopolitan Western cities, not in Muslim-majority countries. Second, several of the scenes focus on the protesting women being arrested for breaking the law. The patriarchy that is being protested is not, therefore, only an issue about Islam.

There is a basic principle of physics that every action results in a reaction. The moral code that would cause a Tunisian cleric to condemn a young Tunisian woman for exposing her breast on Facebook causes a protest from an international feminist organization. And, not surprisingly, there is a counter to this from a “Muslimah Pride” network. As the young woman in the image above indicates, she does not feel liberated by exposing her body. But perhaps even more poignant is her comment that she does not need saving. It is not clear if this Muslim woman is condemning the Tunisian woman at the center of the current protest, but she is definitely making a statement about her own body. Whose body is it anyway?

FEMEN has attracted followers for a variety of reasons. I suspect that some testosterone-loaded males in the West cheer wildly whenever a woman shows her bare breasts. These hardly support the stated goal of FEMEN: “sextremism serving to protect women’s rights, democracy watchdogs attacking patriarchy, in all its forms: the dictatorship, the church, the sex industry.” Historically there is no question that women have not had equal rights with men in economic, political or legal contexts; this is true for almost all cultures, ranging from those with despicable patriarchal rules to democracies with permanent glass ceilings. Secularism has challenged many (but not all) of these inequalities, giving women the right to own property, vote, and theoretically have equal opportunities in education and the workplace. Appeals to women’s rights resonate with most people, whether secular or religious, but the devil is in the details.

There is also an elephant in the room, in everyone’s room: who decides what women’s rights are? Continue reading Whose body is it anyway? →