History cannot remain masculine

Women are mostly kept out of history books, and if they are marvellous enough to have made it into them their images most likely did not 

History is a past retold, a series of events that have been documented by those who have witnessed their occurrence. It is human nature to write of that which interests us, of facts that are deemed essential at the time of inscription and that is why history as is documented, is as much an interpretation, as it is a collection of facts. The names and events that have made it into history books have changed the world one way or the other, their existence and our knowledge of it is essential, but what of those names that were never uttered by history teachers, are their world-altering actions erased? Or do their trials and tribulations factor into the shaping of the future whether they are remembered or not?

If we casually flick through the history books we are most likely to see pages filled with iconic figures that have left their imprint on the world, most of which are men. Great and not-so-great men have both maimed and healed our world simultaneously and from their experiences we have much to learn. Even those of us who are not prolific in politics, sports or technology are instantaneously able to recognise an image of such men as Che Guevara, Maradona and Steve Jobs. Though just as it may be, to have such figures made iconic and embraced by pop-culture how many of those faces we see on posters, T-shirts and spray-painted on walls are of women? Does that mean that throughout history no woman has ever been iconic enough? Or is it that the telling of her story was not deemed essential to those documenting at the time of inscription? No female face would be so widely and easily identified except maybe those of whom who made it to the silver screen. Could you point out Florence Nightingale in a series of photos like you would Marilyn Monroe? Would you know the great Fatima al-Fihri’s contribution to the world just as you would Umm Kulthum’s?

Throughout the world and specifically throughout the Middle-Eastern one, much to do with women is concealed. Women are mostly kept out of history books, and if they are marvellous enough to have made it into them their images most likely did not. This makes it impossible for people to know of them and for those searching for them it makes for an absolutely exhausting task, in turn their accomplishments and impact on the world are rendered obsolete and the chance of people learning from them non-existent. Just as is the way of the world, change is inevitable and for women’s struggle with history, change is coming. 

Recently Muslim women have become more visible than they ever were, standing up to oppression and advocating the plight of minorities around the world. In a visual world where icons are required their images have helped immortalise their work. Malala Yousafzai’s survival and perseverance has become a representation of all women facing the horrors of extremism and the plight for female education. Young girls today have forces such as seventeen-year-old Ahed Tamimi, whose brave defiance in the face of Zionist settlers landed her in prison, catapulting her to icon-status for resistance against occupation around the world. Women have become revolutionary icons, Iranian Neda Agha-Soltan, a student, who died from a fatal shot to the head during protests in Tehran has become a symbol of an entire revolution. Along with Egypt’s Ghada Kamal Abdul Khaleq, known to the Western press as the Girl in the Blue Bra and affectionately dubbed Sitt el Banat (Leader of the Girls) in Egypt, whose image being dragged half-naked by police has become a source of artistic representation of oppression. 

During the Women’s March against the Trump administration in the United States an image of Munira Ahmed wearing the American flag as a Hijab (headdress) became the representation of American tolerance and pro-immigration ideals. And the latest brave soul who was unfortunately taken too soon is Palestinian Razan Najjar, a twenty-one-year-old paramedic, who spent her days saving the lives of fellow countrymen and women peacefully protesting the Israeli occupation. She was killed in cold blood by an Israeli sniper while attending to the injured, she will forever be a symbol of humanity amidst bloodshed.

Because we have borne witness to those women who have shattered glass ceilings and died for their rights we have the obligation to correct the errors of the past, to not let their work go unnoticed, to broadcast, interview, write and teach about those women who are changing our world. In the near future the images in history will differ and the faces who changed the world would no longer be reserved for the masculine. We always knew history to be a story told by him but the future will have one that is written by her as well.

This article was first published in The Gulf Today newspaper 10 June, 2018 http://bit.ly/2JCRplR  
Arabic version of the article appeared on the same day  in Al Khaleej newspaper http://bit.ly/2McgVg4

Barricaded in Ideological Bunkers

The world has shrunk. The vastness that our ancestors experienced is no longer. We have paved roads, built bridges, rode the waves and flew among the clouds to make sure that no place was beyond our reach, we aimed for the moon and touched it. As a generation we are today the most connected we have ever been, the most exposed and yet our social and intellectual disconnect is ever so prevalent. Information is abundant, it flows through so many sources that what once was a river one waded through is now a flood we struggle to keep afloat in. How difficult it has become to decipher the truth from the fictitious, to trust one’s own eyes over the art of image distortion. Information is power and if readings have taught us anything, it is that power inevitably corrupts. 

Realising that the information torrent is not to be restrained we built dams, cyber dams that attempted to identify us and according to our online actions, categorised and sorted information based on what the algorithms concluded our interests were. At the onset it seemed a logical solution to an impending problem, one is fed the information he/she is interested in and the rest is filtered out, but just like any experiment the long-term results tend to vary from immediate ones. In this case the negative effects have surpassed those of the initial problem for by altering the way we consume information we have altered the way we differentiate, analyse and digest it.

Bewildered by the sheer amount of information we have devised a way that has made us the most sorted culture we have ever been, categorised by apps and search engines we are no longer hiding from the other, we are blind to it. We have the choice to follow the news that is important to us, categorised into subjects of interest of course, we choose the images we would like to see and the people we have conversations with based on criteria that appeal to us, we have unconsciously placed ourselves in the information comfort zone. It is common knowledge that surrendering to the comfort zone limits one’s experiences and keeps them from mental and emotional growth yet people have found a way to sort themselves into these comfortable ideological bunkers in which only the familiar is available. 

Many of us no longer expose or surround ourselves with people who disagree with us politically or ideologically, we have the ability through a click of a button to silence those whose beliefs we find culturally offensive or merely different, and while this might be both convenient and comfortable it is also dangerous. 

The walls we build around us to keep the noise out only reverberate the same ideas, notions and beliefs we enforce, leaving no room for debate. When we opt out of an argument we are choosing to ignore opposing views thereby failing to understand the other. Humans are social creatures that thrive through connections, ones that cannot be made if we willingly close our minds henceforth closing our hearts to that which is different. As we seek out our preferred social settings we are contributing to the segregation of nations. There is great benefit in the variety of opinions and the outcomes of intellectual debates, a fostering of a more tolerant society one that is all the more enlightened for it. 

It is fear that reinforces the walls we build, people are afraid to be swayed from their convictions, afraid to question their moral instincts and expose themselves to ideas that may challenge the fabric of their entire existence, but what are we if we are not seeking to better ourselves? 

Change is nothing to be afraid of and if one’s curiosity changes them then they will be all the wiser for it. So read outside your preferred genre, expose your eyes to art that provokes you and engage in conversations with people who hail from worlds alien to your own, only then will you pave intellectual roads, build emotional bridges, ride diverse journeys, and fly among ideas that liberate. Aim for that which you fear and touch it for the closer we get to that which scares us the less afraid we become.

This article was first published in The Gulf Today newspaper 20 February, 2018  http://bit.ly/2BEkfh3

Arabic version of the article appeared on the same day  in Al Khaleej newspaper http://bit.ly/2ocPrwD

2017, The Year of Female Reckoning

As a year comes to a close we tend to look back in reflection at its most memorable moments and although this year had many it remains distinguishable from the rest, for it is not often that we witness a tangible shift in perspective happen in the span of 12 months. 2017 has been the year of female reckoning whose path was paved by the electing of a man with sexual harassment cases filed against him and who was filmed speaking abhorrently about what ‘powerful men’ are allowed to do to women. The election of the 45th President to the land of the free ignited all kinds of protests but none as massive as the Women’s March that took place on January 21st, a day after the presidential oath was sworn, it was the largest single-day protest recorded in US history. 

Like it or not, Trump was the best thing to happen to women’s solidarity since the Suffragettes.

From that moment onwards the world got a sense of something stirring within the female community, suddenly more women began identifying with feminism a word that until recently was viewed as derogatory, and more men were finally recognising that gender-equality is not a demand to be made solely by women, it was a human right everyone should be advocating. The news during 2017 was peppered with issues such as gender-pay gap, violence against women, and sex discrimination in the workplace, terminology that has been deemed unfashionable and lost its potency in the US since the explosion of feminism in the 1970s. We saw the year end with two words and a hashtag placed in front of them that have been retweeted, shared and worn as a badge of honour by women around the world, the hashtag #MeToo, used by women to indicate their exposure to sexual harassment, was in the millions only a few days after the actress Alyssa Milano used it as a call for action against Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein. No one could predict the number of personal stories from all around the world that came pouring in via this hashtag and all of a sudden it was clear that sexual harassment is a worldwide pandemic that no woman or girl is immune to. The sheer magnitude of the #MeToo hashtag did not allow for any more excuses to be made, no longer was shaming the victim a possibility and brushing off sexual harassment as anything other than the predatory behaviour that it really is, was not a viable option anymore. 

This year saw great names fall and a lifetime of careers extinguished. Power, the one aspiration such men dream of, no longer legitimised their bullying and unwelcome advances. 2017 is the year that redefined what it means to be a ‘man of power’. Time magazine has chosen its person of the year for 2017 to be the ‘Silence Breakers’, the women who spoke out about their abusers, it listed women from different races, professions and age-groups whose voices helped push a stagnant female movement to a point of no return. 

The age-old patriarchy that has enforced its power on women since the dawn of time never changed, it had just assimilated into the new age and camouflaged its way into civil society creeping through the alleyways all the way up to the boardrooms of international conglomerates. It wears many masks and hides behind so many reasons but women recognise it wherever it appears. Girls feel it when they walk to school every day; women are haunted by it in places that are meant to be safe havens. For years women believed that because a man can never truly understand that icky feeling one gets as she is paid an unsolicited compliment or told a sexist joke or worse, that there was no use of trying to explain, that this was just how the world went. But even if it did, it shouldn’t, and there is no better time to change it. The shaming culture that has kept women’s mouths shut for so long is on its way towards extinction for the door to proclamation has been kicked open with the force of a thousand years of restraint and the injustices have been shouted out with the shrill of a thousand years of shamed silence. 

2017 was the year of female reckoning and women have everything to look forward to.

This article was first published in The Gulf Today newspaper 26 December, 2017 http://bit.ly/2C36OFD

Arabic version of the article appeared on the same day in Al Khaleej newspaper http://bit.ly/2C4E9jw