Free Content Offer from Aeon Magazine

Informations

• Publié par: Aeon-Magazine
• Nombre de lectures: 18
• Langue: English

Extrait

Free Content Offer from Aeon Magazine

PR Newswire LONDON, October 18, 2012

LONDON,October 18, 2012/PRNewswire/ --

Amal Ghandour - 'The Art of Presence: How the Women of The Arab SpringFight on for Greater Rights'

EXTRACT FOR FREE USE ON YOUR SITE:AEON,a new digital magazine about culture and ideas and featuring major contributors, would like to offer an extract of our essay by Amal Ghandour for free publication on websites and blogs. Print may be permissible but please check w ith the contact given below.

AEON Conditions:On the page where you publish the extract the author must be named and we ask for a clear credit and hyperlink to the full essay. Please state that the content comes from Aeon Magazine where a full version can be found. In addition we also require a recommendation and link to follow the Aeon twitter account.

This credit may read:

" This is an abridged version of an essay that appears inAeona new online magazine about ideas and culture. You can follow them on Twitter at@AeonMag"

th note: link to essay above under 'Aeon' will go live when article is published onThursday 18October6.30 am GMT

Link for credit:http://www.aeonmagazine.com/living-together/amal-ghandour-arab-women

Precis:One year on from the Arab Spring, as Islamists reap the rewards resulting from the overthrow of autocratic rule across the Middle East, Lebanese writer and activist Amal Ghandour offers an insider view the contested position of Arab women. How optimistic can we be about their prospects for greater freedom of movement and expression given that the hopes raised by last year's revolution now seem like a false dawn?

Extract begins:

" I will call her Hadaf. At 34, her resume impresses: a BA in graphic design from Yarmouk University; a stint with a high-flying advertising agency; top job in a global company; and, recently, an MBA from the London Business School. In Jordan, among the well-heeled, a decent education and a career with the tight skirts to match are not unusual. Dig a little deeper, though, and you discover that Hadaf's life encapsulates the hard-going struggles of Arab women to transform their unforgiving circumstances into a better set of odds.

'Inch by inch,' she says. 'This is how I escaped marriage at 16 to a car mechanic, how I shortened my skirts and rolled up my sleeves a little; how I managed to get to Yarmouk University, how I waitressed there, and in the Hard Rock Café in Amman. I lobbied my mother, talked my father to death, had him visit my dorms, had him meet the owners of the restaurants where I worked. I was making a living, so it was difficult for him to argue with that.'

In fact, Hadaf engineered her escape from the car m echanic by parading in a T-shirt in front of his garage. 'He was the one who broke off the engagement,' she says, with pride.

Suad has enjoyed a more liberal upbringing. But at 22, and with a budding career in community developm ent, she is learning that she, too, has to negotiate what it means to be a woman. Two months ago she set aside the veil she's worn since youth, inspired by the rousing theme of nonconformity threading through her English Literature courses at the University of Amman. 'As a woman, you worry about consequences,' she says, 'but then you take a step, then another after that, and another after that. You make use of every opening.' Her father was delighted to see her let her hair down, but the backlash at work, especially among the men, has been upsetting. Suad shrugs: 'better this than hypocrisy.' .

On their own such personal triumphs as Suad's and H adaf's stand as heartening anecdotes on the margins of what is a crushingly discouraging situation for Arab wom en. One is tempted to ask: only this, after so many years of struggle? But pulled together and read differently, these small victories create a different norm of empowerment that draws strength from the very subtlety of the 'dissident' acts themselves.

US-based sociologist Asef Bayat calls this persistent haggling for better terms and more space on the everyday terrain of education, sport, art and work, the 'art of presence'. Its methods contrast sharply with the vocal public activism championed in the West. With good reason: Arab women are much more effective in extricating concessions from systems that are lethally unresponsive to organized action. This is not to suggest that the Arab

region has been free of concerted public advocacy for gender rights. But that advocacy, too, has had to be a rather genteel prodding of the state, balancing its masculine sensibilities with emphatic demands for better legal protections.

If the prospects for Arab women in these potentially revolutionary times seem grim, it is because we've been here th before. When men mobilized against colonial powers in the mid-20 century, women moved along with them, hoping that some of the resulting freedoms would include them. They didn't. And as dictatorships quickly took root across the region, liberation ended up offering little to the men themselves.

With Islamists now reaping the rewards of last year's Arab uprisings, the fear is that history will repeat itself. Worse still, that Islamism will connive to overturn what few rights women have already won, whilst bolstering the patriarchal prerogative stubbornly entrenched in custom, religion and the law.

In this context, it is telling that thehijabhas become every other female's constant companion. Just as, in the first years after independence, it was the relatively better educated, more affluent women who were first to unveil, so the daughters of the rising middle classes were first to put it back on, sending it up the same flagpole of identity politics.

If you listen to the arguments of thehijab's early champions, however, you find yourself weaving a paradox of defiance in retreat, of empowerment through conform ity. For the more women went about their business freely in public, the more the indignities piled up in the hustle and bustle of life in, say, 1970s Cairo. On buses, at work, in the neighbourhood, at university, there boomed the loud discomforts of a society that had never accepted women as full partners in the public sphere. Hence the merciless harassment that has turned a supposed act of emancipation into a sellout to Western corruption.

Talk to women veiling-up today and the stories you hear possess the same complex weave. Yet even the m ost sensitive reading of the veil and its many meanings cannot avoid the rueful question posed by Jordanian activist Samar Dudin: 'What kind of free choice is it, when you're making it out of fear, or need forsutra(protection), or intolerable peer pressure, or just - for the love of God - to be left alone? How do you practice free choice in the absence of even a semblance of freedom?'

If Dudin is right, how optimistic dare we be in our predictions?

Barely a few pages into this new era in Arab history, you could sketch it every which way you like. For every female friend of mine who sees a magnificent opportunity, I have another doubting the odds. Meanwhile, the news keeps churning out headlines about us that lift the spirits, only to sink them again almost immediately. "

The extract is under a Creative Commons licenseAttributions-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported (CC BY-ND 3.0)

The full essay including images and all other content on Aeonmagazine.com must not be used.

About Amal Ghandour

http://www.aeonmagazine.com

NOTES TO EDITORS

Amal Ghandour is a communications strategist for the Arab Human Rights Fund, a blogger, and the author ofAbout This Man Called Ali. She lives in Beirut.

About AEON

st AEONThe magazineOctober 2012. is a digital magazine about culture, science and ideas,launched on 1 features original long-form articles, as well as shorter features, by the world's leading writers, thinkers and experts. Illuminated by specially commissioned photography and illustrations,AEONprovides the immersive experience of a print magazine - in an exclusively digital form, with no paywall. New articles are added to the site each weekday. http://www.aeonmagazine.com.

If you are interested in taking extracts from forthcoming articles on an exclusive basis please contact [e-mail]

AEON - FORTHCOMING CONTENT

Long form essays will be arranged under five core themes:

World Views: beyond the culture wars Nature & Cosmos: the living world in science and culture Being Human: from family life to neuroscience Living Together: society and politics in a wider context Oceanic Feeling: on heightened experience and poetic impulses

Previous articles include:

Dava Sobel -The transit of VenusOn5 June 2012the planet Venus passed across the face of the Sun for the last time this century. Dava Sobel observed the transit from the Mount Wilson Observatory in California. H ere she reflects on the experience, through the lenses of both science and history, the latter brought vividly to life by troops of amateur astronomers carting antique telescopes up the mountain.

Dava Sobel is a former New York Times science reporter, and has written for many magazines, including Audubon, Discover, Life and The New Yorker. She is the best-selling author of Longitude, Galileo's Daughter and The Planets.

David Deutsch -The future of Artificial Intelligence

Ever since 1950, computer scientists have been convinced that humanity was on the brink of building machines capable of thought. Today, they seem as tantalizingly out of reach as ever. Will we ever cross that threshold? Deutsch considers the challenges posed by the most philosophically fraught engineering puzzle our species has ever set itself.

David Deutsch is the father of quantum computation. A British physicist at theUniversity of Oxford, he won the Dirac Prize of the Institute of Physics in 1998 and the Edge of Computation Science Prize in 2005. His second popular book, The Beginning of Infinity, came out in 2011.