Reaction to Mona El Tahawy’s essay on Arab women

In the article published in Foreign Policy by the Egyptian-American columnist Mona El Tahawy, she argues that in the Arab World/Middle East takes place a war on women. According to her, Arab men are ‘hating’ Arab women. This explaining sexual harrasment, genital mutilation, virginity tests, child marriage, etc.

Alas, Mona El Tahawy commits 3 big mistakes:

1) to mix facts with personnal opinions/impressions: the article starts with a fictional scene from a novel by great Egyptian writer, gives a few facts and then concludes with biased personnal impressions. How is established the connection between objective events and an inner subjective feeling called hate? Why ignoring aside all known works that emphasizes the importance of economical instability, social background, political chaos?

2) to consider Arab men, alltogether as a non-official supranational monolithic group, that cooperate instinctively, driven only by their hate towards Arab women. To consider these men’s sole purpose is to make of women’s lives a nightmare. The origin of this will to crush women, apparently, consists in a mix of culture and religion. Thus forgetting that the “Arab World” is a mixed bag of twenty-two countries, each of them with different cultural background, History, society. There is more difference between the legal/social status of a women in Tunisia and in Saudi Arabia than between a woman in Tunisia and Italy. There is a bigger cultural overlap between Morocco and Mali than between Morocco and Bahraïn. And maybe there is more difference between the lifestyle of cities and countrysides of one same country than between two urban areas of two different countries?  So what Arab World, what Arab men and women are we talking about? Mona El Tahawy mixes in a few paragraphs what happens to women in Egypt, Yemen, Saudi altogether and more or less assumes that in every Arab country women suffers from the sum of all these added abuses. The fact is, there is no “Arab feminists” or “Arab societies”, there is Egyptian/Moroccan/Saudi/etc feminists and societies, each country having its issues with women’s rights and its own battles to lead.

3) to forget to compare and consider the long History of feminism of other parts of the World. Mona El Tahawy looks to the women issues in the Arab World as if it was an isolated case in the world, as if what happens there is unique in its kind and could be understood only with cultural/religious backwardness of the region. While looking at women’s conditions in other parts of the world would have enlighted Mona (and us) about the fact that in particular political change and military conflicts can drive a drastic change for better or worse in women’s conditions. Is the dramatic condition of women in Afghanistan or Iran a result of cultural backwardness or is it at least partly due to political and geopolitical conditions, given the fact that less than 50years ago women in these countries were living freely? Why did the European feminism win its biggest battles between WWI and WWII and shortly after? Is there not any useful conclusions to make from the drift between women’s rights in Western and Eastern Europe? Mona speaks extensively about sexual harrasment in Egypt, why does she not compare with a country like South Africa where 40% of women are forced into their first sexual intercourse instead of comparing it less revelantly with the rest of Arab world?

Mona El Tahawy is an influential columnist; in consequence, her article launched a vast debate on women’s conditions in the Arab World on blogs and social medias. The fact she reaches wrong conclusions disconnected from reality is counterbalanced by the number of smart reactions and answers by women from Egypt, Kuwait or anywhere else that enlight us about field based experiences. If it had this effect, then at least it was worth it. Still, I hope in the future she takes care of not speaking on behalf of “Arab women”, especially when she apparently has never put a foot in most of the countries she mentions and thus never interacted with women from there.

Comparing Obama’s speech on the Middle-East with his Cairo Speech

The communication with the Arab and/or Muslim World looks like being a conundrum for the Western World. The way George W. Bush adressed some issues related to the Arabs/Muslims is maybe the perfect example on what to not say to them. Obama speeches were always clean of the obvious mistakes of his predecessors and this 2011 speech on the Middle-East was even cleaner. The 2009 Cairo speech was actually so brillantly written that it really raised hopes in the Middle-East for a change. But alas, from 2009 to 2011, these high expectations were disappointed, not only because of Iraq and Afghanistan wars or the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but also because of the attitude towards the Arab dictators facing street protests: the support to the uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt came too late, only when it was clear to the US that they can dump their dear allies (Mubarak, Ben Ali, Gaddafi,…) because they were already almost toppled.

Thus, it is in this mindframe of scepticism that most of us, Arabs, listened to this Middle-East Speech. We kind of all had our “checklist”: some were waiting how Obama will mention Bahrain, some others how is he to address about Israel and Palestine, etc. None of us was really waiting for anything interesting and special to be said, most of us were just looking for a renewed confirmation of a new form of the good old hypocrisy: same old routine, only covered with more elegant words than his predecessors would have used.

What I was personnally interested in was in fact the difference between the Cairo speech of 2009 and this speech of 2011 on Middle-East, not in terms of the content itself, but in terms of the form, the strategy of communication. Although the latter was pronounced from the White House, it is quite obvious that it was prepared with the intention to address to the Arab World. The decision to not hold this speech in front of an Arab audiance in an Arab country proves there is a hesitation to face directly Arabs, as there is no certainty on the welcoming it would have had (after all Clinton was boycotted in Egypt by youth and hooted by Tunisians to the point she had to cancell her speach in Tunis). As the changes go in the North African and Middle Eastern region, the”West” adapts its communication.They are totally aware the Arab revolutions were the occasion of multiple  failures in communication and decisions, and that this caused a great damage on the trust the Arab and Muslim World have on them. Not only they want to restore that trust (surprisingly they seem to think that regaining it needs only to adapt the way of speaking, instead of admitting it needs a complete change of policy, what will apparently never happen), but also they are in high need of understanding the new Arab references.

The main differences between the two speeches are:

1. The Storytelling: in Obama 2009 speech, there were very few of the “storytelling” US rethoric is normally full of (emphazing arguments with an example of a person’s life story), besides the very brief mention to his own story linking him to Africa, while in the 2011 Speech, many mentions were done: Rosa Parks, Muhammad Bouazizi, Wael Ghonim (indirectly, by mentionning his position at Google), some Israeli father whose son was killed by Hamas starting a peace NGO. The Tunisian and Egyptian revolutions certainly made realize to Obama, Clinton and their team how important will be now the ordinary people of the Arab World. Instead of talking about elites, refering to great places or figures of History, the ‘normal’ people (including women) that achieved great things with almost nothing were mentioned. The storytelling, that ensured Ronald Reagan with a great popularity in his country as a president and was so to say the standard of communication of George W. Bush (and Nicolas Sarkozy), is a very classical technique to reach the very general audiances: (over)simplifying in talking with images instead of building a consistant chain of arguments.
2. Erasing American references: only with the “told stories” one can see that they refer all but one (Rosa Parks) to Arabs. But the shift goes beyond this. In 2009 speech, there was a point about stressing on the fact that Islam was part of American History, about the fight for civic rights of African Americans, about the Cold War, etc, while in 2011 speech the direct references to American History are completely erased (except for the reference to the American Revolution where Patriots refused to pay taxes to a king). Even the cited locations were chosen to fit to the Arab perspective (Cairo, Benghazi, Sanaa). In two words, we are moving here from speeches where we talk about “American values to export” to speeches where we talk about “universal values”, that happen to be shared by America as well as by other parts of the world, worth fighting for, although America didn’t create these values. US want to give a more “modest” image of themselves, they don’t  anymore commit the mistake to pretend they are  bringing democracy/peace/hope as global leader (although Hillary Clinton in the few words preceding Obama speech expressed her views about the need of an American strong “leadership”). On the contrary they emphazise on the fact that these values are wanted and activelly won by the Arabs themselves. Americans want now to endorse the more “neutral” role (in surface only of course) of those who will just propose help (economical, G20, technological, etc) and let free the Arabs to decide if they want that help or not (of course it is just a very hypocrit way of presenting things).
3. Avoiding religious references: of course, 2009 was technically a speech to the Muslim World, while 2011 is a speech on the Middle-East, but no one will deny how much entangled are Middle-East and Islam. 2009 was not only refering to Al-Azhar, the Quran or Obama’s own Christianity, it was also speaking the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in terms of Jews and Shoah, Muslims and Christians. In the 2011 speech, he prefered to talk Israel-Palestine in terms of frontiers, security and official mutual recognition, Bahrain in terms of Iranian strategic political interest, and Arab revolutions in general in mentionning freedom, economy, technology, information. The only explicit references were made were the “region that was the birthplace of three world religions” and the Muslim/Copt violence in Egypt and the offered solution to take the Iraqi “multi-ethnic multi-sectarian democracy” as an example (what a strange idea by the way to take this as an example). In erasing the reference to religion and particularely to Islam, it is quite clear that the United States want to enter in a new phase of their relation with Arabs where they can close the Islamism/extremism/Al-Qaeda chapter. In a way, by saying that Al-Qaeda was against democracy, that it lost its revelancy in the region, that more has been done in six months of civil unrest  than in decades by terrorists, but also by not referring to the recent choice  of a new head for Al-Qaeda and denying the Ossama Ben Laden’s posthume message praising Arab revolutions, US call for having the right to “move to something else”: US wants to make known that they want to make politics, business (a lot of business in fact), partnerships; they don’t want anymore to be seen as the oppressor of Muslims around the World. As if there was any chance that Arabs could forget the military support of Israel anyway (clearly mentionned in the 2011 speech).
4. Adopting Arabic rethoric: the only concession done to arabic language in 2009 speech was the opening “Salam Aleikom“. In 2011, there is a will to “speak the way Arabs speak”. Some linguistic specifities of the Arabic language are adopted. For example, the repetition of terms, very classic in arabic, but avoided as much as possible in english is clear in a sentence like “Square by square, town by town, country by country” (unfortunately for Obama, his advisors do not seem to have noticed the similarity that each Arab will notice with Gaddafi murderous speech “Zenga zenga, bit bit, dar dar“, meaning “street by street, house by house, room by room“). Another flagrant example is the sentence (actually the answer to the non-asked question) where he says: “Bin Laden was no martyr“, the word martyr being extremely often used not only in Islamic lexical field, but also in general Arab’s (for example, the people killed on Tahrir Square, regardless of their religion, are referred as martyrs by Egyptians), while it is totally absent from previous American official speeches. Adapting arabic rethoric is a way of looking “more familiar”, or “more comprehensive”.

I see the 2011 speech on the Middle-East as being a “grammatical contortion”: US diplomacy makes moves that are unnatural to them, not because they are taking a new orientation with us, Arabs, but because they think that if they want to continue to pursue the goals they always pursued in the region (oil, Israel and capitalism), they just have to make it a bit more subtly. With this Obama speech we officially entered in the era where the United States understand Arabs are not just parameters to adjust and fine tune, but a whole part of the world with 400 million people with real personal expectations and real intention to be sovereign. Let’s be clear: that’s only plastic surgery. If there was any real consideration to Arab aspirations, a word would have been adressed to the aspirations of the people living in the most repressive country of the region governed by a medieval feodal system, Saudi Arabia, and more firm positions would have been taken to condemn what happens in Syria and Bahrain.

Mimmicking our way of building sentences and arguments and using our own references is not enough and will never be; in fact it is even almost a bad idea from an American perspective for it makes it even easier for us  to detect where exactly there is hypocrisy,emptiness or offense. It is as if President Obama tried to cook for us a couscous or any other Arab dish and really thought we won’t be able to make the difference with our own cooking. The thing is, sadly for Americans and luckily for Arabs, very, very few of us were fooled by this new way of addressing us.

Ben Laden’s death has fed America’s appetite for blood, not for justice

President Obama’s “Justice has been done” is trending: on TV, in papers, on the web, even in casual conversations. Ossama Ben Laden’s arrest/death was wished by most of the Americans for now a decade. The outburst of joy depicted us an indecent at ease with itself thirst of blood within Americans.The American President was not the only one to see his approval rating jumping: following results of a poll held after Ben Laden’s death, 1/3 of the Americans are now in favor of detention of innocents in Guantanamo, more than half of Americans believe their mission in Afghanistan is not complete and about 44% think is winning its “War on Terror”.

The conclusion we can draw here is horrific in itself: we wrongly interpreted these last years’ growing opposition of Americans to the murderous wars in Iraq and in Afghanistan as ideological humanist positions of people becoming progressively aware of the fact that these wars are slaughtering civilians and unhappy they were fooled on the reality on the battlefield; now we see that they were disapproving them not because the wars were ethically wrong but only because they were losing them. In short: a dominating opportunistic point of view, not an ethical one.Those who wanted their “boys” back, were not asking for it in purpose of stopping this continuous rape of countries sovereignty and peoples lives: it was merely a “hunger strike” to protest against the fact that their thirst of blood was not adequately satisfied; consumers were unhappy to have been promised the finest beef tournedos and are brought only cheap industrial poultry. And now that they tasted Ben Laden’s blood, the appetite for destruction is just increasing. The lowest part of the being needs to be fed with revenge, humiliation inflicted to others.

America learnt nothing on why in the first place the rest of the World is so keen to be fed with anti-American feelings: their attitude consisting of making prevail their interests and profits over anything else, including any form of ethics, careless of the protests and opposition their acts might encounter, as long as they have enough weapons to crush them. After all, did Barack Obama mean anything else when he says during his announcement on Ben Laden’s death: “ tonight, we are once again reminded that America can do whatever we set our mind to. “.

And what comes next? I mean after Muslims paid with 900’000 lives the price of “justice”, will people of Afghanistan, Iraq or Pakistan be given the right to live a normal life, without US troops on their territories? Families of the World Trade Center had their “justice” when Al-Qaeda leader passed away, will the Muslims have right to relief (yes, just relief, since “justice” is affordable only for those who own drones), in seeing the end of the “War on Terror” that was imposed on them? The US have given their answer: no.

First because US officials notified it extremely clearly: Ben Laden’s death is not the end of the war. It is understood that it was much of a high psychological impact, but as this assassination does not disrupt the organizational scheme of Al-Qaeda, a lot has still to be done to fulfill the goals of the “War on Terror”.

Second, this “victory”, by justifying the massive investment of Bush and Obama into the wars, opens the door to a more aggressive global military policy. A first clear sign was given in this direction, when on May 7th a drone attack was launched in Yemen targetting the leader of Al-Qaeda in the Arabic Peninsula, the American-Yemeni Anwar Al-Awqali, failing in killing him but causing the death of two men. For now like for the last 10years, US is nor bothered nor concerned about this kind “collateral damages”. If it is to kill 5 or 10 millions Muslims around the world in addition just to reach their targets and pursue their agenda, so be it. People of Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan (and soon Iran?) are, for the US foreign policy, no more than insects they can crush without any apology, without any shame. Americans will slowly reconciliate with torture as now it was proven that “it works“, Obama promise to close Guantanamo Bay camp became secondary. Fundings will continue to be granted. Muslims will continue to be killed.

When looking back to the last decade, one has the bitter feeling that US did not understand anything during this war on terror: if efforts were engaged to suppress the roots of the hatred they inspire to Al-Qaeda as well as to the rest of Muslims, even the moderates (even the modern educated revolutionnary egyptian and tunisian youth praised by all worldwide medias have shown their rejection of US strategy in the Arab World in boycotting Hillary Clinton’s visit in Egypt and Tunisia), they would have won the war. If they had fought the aggressive imperialism they submit the world with, they would have gained the sympathy of all. We wanted to believe in a change. All throughout Africa and the Muslim world, we have seen people celebrating Barack Obama’s election in 2008 and Cairo speech in 2009, simply because somewhere, we all thought that a half-African man could be the perfect person to understand what it is to stand on the other side of the barrier, to understand the expressions of despair from populations starving, not accessing education or medication, living in unstable or tyrannic state… for the unique reason that most of the policies that rule our countries are not decided in our parliaments, but in the White House, following interests far from the local population wishes and needs. It didn’t take long for the optimists we all were  to be disappointed.

The truth is that since the end of the second World War, the United States won every battle but lost every war (Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan). Operations were always fulfilled, targets were always reached. But because their outrageous imperialism/neo-colonialism  inspired each day more new opponents than it could kill, making the distance to go to the finishing line of their quest increasing after each step instead of decreasing. Now in killing Ossama Ben Laden, they just added one more item on their list of shameful records during their lost War on Terror. Terror was not eliminated, it only changed its location: the crowds celebrating the death of one man are showing how much terrorized they are from the inside, to the point to “need” that blood to reassure themselves, to simulate their lost sense of justice, while the Muslim and Arab World experiencing the first days of the “Arab Spring” ousting the Oriental puppets of an Almighty West that lost track on the too numerous files they try to handle, the first and only targets in number of victims of the War on Terror, only increase in courage to claim their opposition to an unfair world, building nations where “justice has been done” won’t be just an empty statement.