Category Archives: Afghanistan

To the women in my life,…

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To my mama who gave me my independence since I was 9 years old to decide the terms of my life and be a free bird in this world. Without these travels (inner and outer), all of this would not be. Because of you, I have been able to live so consciously and responsibly.

To my Masi’s in Singapore, I just love you all so much. Family is everything for me. Thank you for being there for my mama when I could not.

To the Sabri women, I can give my darkest days to you and you will still love me for it.  If I can recall my favourite life moments, its just sitting around the breakfast table talking and laughing for hours. Simple moments are the most beautiful. I inherited a family that I feel has always been mine.

To Anna who has been this year’s wonderful gift. I will never forget Real hot chocolates and musings. We have created so much together in our work – finding fun in reading court Judgments and strategizing gender justice in context. I hope from this passion, we will come to see where these paths will later take us. More so, you have been like another half of me – and it feels so comforting to know you are a walk away and that you’ll always be there. When the Spring comes, the gardens will be filled with endless talking!

To Helena - you don’t know how much you shaped my thinking, cause a self-reflection that has enabled me to see beyond my paradigm. Through our conversations, I became a better person, lawyer and activist.

To Sara, Deya, Manisha and Nishma thank you for staying close despite your busy schedules. You are each a solid pillar to our efforts. You are the Volunteer-spirit. But more so, you are also a part of my life I will always have a space for. It is my dream that one day I can spend a whole weekend with each of you, from Nepal down to Culcutta and east-wards to Palestine. Nishma, I’ll transit in London on my way.

To Kirthi and Shahla thank you for in a short time integrating so well into our work. I do wish that you will carve your own space in our work that is yours. I think you both have exceptional futures ahead which I hope will inter-twine with mine and ours.

To Hangama and Zarqa Jan thank you for giving me a chance to work so closely with you. You made year 2012 for me. 2012 was a year to learn from your work and extraordinary resilience. Under your guidance, you have given me so much flexibility to be creative, to try new things and to share these experiences with Femin Ijtihad. I will never forget the friendships at WCLRF. You gave me a chance and this experience I will never forget. I am always here for this!

To Nadia and Sush - My biggest excitement for this year is re-uniting with the two of you in Ireland. It is such a wonder, coming together again in a completely different phase of each of our lives. I have been sad because living away, the time difference, and knowing that life has changed is difficult to accept. But it does make meeting each other much more exciting. Nadia, needless to say you just have always been. Sush, thank you for spending those 4 nights with me in London – it really was picking up right where we left off in 2009. What I learned from those nights was how much life was a flow of events, one colliding into the next. With you I could trace back each event which could not happen without the one that preceded…and it took me all the way back to the roadside fortune teller outside Shiva’s Temple. Somehow you came at a defining moment. You were sitting with me at the cross-roads. In 5 years, we may discover how London/Ireland was another cross-road..na?

To my women’s rights class and Professors of Human Rights and Islamic Law and Women’s Human Rights –

I never learned so much, wanted to absorb so much, and give so much. I am channeling this from my classes into our activism. Grateful to SOAS for being an academy of such excellence.

To my other friends,

Thank you for your presence (presents) and enrichment in my life. For each laughter and each tear shared. For the worries that left on a wing of a bird called Friendship. For ideas and musings. For dancing and being free. For late nights in the library. For travelling words and overwhelming poetry. For giving me little bits of what life has to offer.

To Shoaib,

You are not a woman. But you are pretty damn amazing for a man!!!!

Love,

Research and Activism

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Notable lessons I took from a PHD Research and Activism Seminar. This is particularly informative those involved in women’s rights programming activities. I hope we can move to designing programs where answers are derived from sincere and honest conversations, as opposed to, being trained by someone of knowledge!

  • Needs Assessments: Instead of taking objectives to the field, develop the objectives from the field. This enables a more participatory approach to assessing needs and responding to them.
    • NL: I think sometimes when we assert that certain rights are immutable and inalienable, we may forget the contexts where these rights are ‘asked’ or ‘contested’. There are nuances to these problems that make the contestations and the asking difficult. We can be mindful that we should not simply be stating “you have rights from violence, you have rights to inheritance etc..” Our publications and programs should instead query why violence occurs, why usurpation of property occurs, by who, and whether the ‘rights’ language is necessarily relevant and timely for the cause. What dialogues can we facilitate and participate in to explore the frustrations behind rights-violations?
  • Mapping the political context; by targeting the institutions that shape the context of research. What is this institution saying about this issue? In fact different institutions may offer different lens and methods of approaching an issue.
  • Instead of identifying ‘opposers’, think of building them within one’s spectrum of allies. Develop goals with them. Even if goals are not aligned, find meaning in conversations even if it leaves the subject with ambiguities. Professor Mir Hosseini always talk about being comfortable with ambiguities. We need not know all the answers NOW.
  • How does our identity as a speaker/trainer create our positionality? Positionality is a power dynamic, real or perceived. By the terms ‘feminist’, or as a ‘lawyer’, etc..one already assumes a knowledge that you seek to impart to others. There are ethical considerations behind this; of how attempting to ‘train’ or ‘educate’ others, you yourself create a hierarchy where feminist knowledge gives one an upper hand over the other?
    • How may FI programs, or the language (on our website) create this feeling amongst beneficiaries? Like “to train, to educate, to teach”….What about “to converse, to hold a dialogue, to discuss, to find ways collectively”? Perhaps this may change the way we design programs.
    • There is an interaction between knowledge and the subject of knowledge. There is a power starting from the power of the pen, which may translate as a sense of superiority over a subject and therefrom over lives, performance and knowledge.
  • The great reminder: We should not be complacent with our knowledge and passion!
  • Also an acceptance that in reality, not all fora will accept us. Professor Welchman speaks of feeling hurt by politics of exclusion for variety of purposes (difference in class status, difference in appearance, difference in religion, difference in regional origins..etc) But she encourages us to be non-territorial, inclusive and unyielding both in perseverance and humility.

Then some interesting notes from Gender and Armed Conflict class by Professor Heathcote:

  • When using the word women, have to think about the differences that exist, singular deployment is a problem.
  • Who do we mean when speaking about women?
  • When are we speaking about women?
  • Where? Cannot just Be a global category. Temporal and geographic.
  • Standpoint; what is your standpoint, where are you doing from, how are you going to deal with difference and difference of women in your work? How do you accommodate differences, where were the connections, or shared experiences?

The story-tellings

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I am scared of the first world narratives, sometimes not wanting to comment; as wherefrom I comment..as I sit in a warm library in London and tonight I’ll return home to a warm room. These nights the temperature bids farewell to kindness; then when I sit to think of the sympathies of student life, on the other side, Maryam is still begging in front of million dollar homes on Karte Se.

I am scared to comment; for I comment on an un-understanding. Maybe affiliation adds no voice. And compassion is yet too poor an experience.

Two emails roll in, in the weekend. Someone needs legal advice. Someone wants to find the needle in the haystack. And I nit-pick things I don’t believe in. But somehow I need to find some resolution to domestic violence and the Shariah. There is not a day I don’t think of Afghanistan.

I did learn something today though! (happy feeling)

I learned that sometimes the difficulties of distance is itself a poetic justice.

Yasmin’s alphabets

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A life was lost some weeks ago; and so did her alphabets. A little girl called Yasmin who found someone to get someone to call someone in India to re-locate me. She was my student. I taught her English in a little room. Her hands were little, always stained with bright orange henna. When she wrote her english alphabets, she wrote with such precision, they used to pop into other pages. Her alphabets was an art piece uncared for in a flimsy notebook. I would always caress her writing like a blind woman read braille. Gratitude for words. Words she could never write. She never got them right. Her “b’s” and “p’s” were always vertically inverted.

Sometimes I would smell the pages. Pencil stains, crumpled paper, the depth of lines, they reminded me of her orange fingers. I don’t know if I did that because she meant something. I have her book buried under the rubble of storage material in an old warehouse some place in England. A treasure I kept, took around the world with me, then lost.

She asked me to visit her. She had cancer, I later found out. She died before I got to see her. I didn’t visit her family. I was ashamed. I was ashamed for weekends promised and lost. I was ashamed for the promises of life-long friendship. Karte Se was a different world. And I sat here with my many regrets.

We began classes revising pro-nouns. I wrote “mim nun” = man, meaning “I”. We always started with “I”. She had endless giggles, “how can you write Dari in English!!!!!!” She would turn to her friend, “how can she write Dari in English….???!!!!”

Dari and English with many an instrument to show love. But sometimes she would not know what to say. So to get my attention, she would tug on my pants until I had to pull them up again. Whenever I said “Yes”, she would look up hoping I was calling her, “Yas”. Sometimes I pretended for her, to please her. “Yes……Yas, did you understand.” She was a keen student even if not very bright. She always wanted to be the best. Sometimes before I could ask a question, she would raise her hand to give an answer. “What answer are you giving Yasmin!!! To what question!?” Then she would look at her friends and laugh.

She taught me “Yaadom raft” for “I forgot” with her signature hand gesture over her shoulder. I used to say “You wrote it so hard in your notebook, how could you forget? Did it fall out of the pages, over your shoulders…..and run away….?” I would walk my fingers down her back as she squirmed to tear away from my tickling.

“No, no, no, I wrote it here. I wrote it here…” flipping through the pages of her notebook. In exasperation she would always sigh and tell me as a matter-of-fact “Teacher (in english), (then in Dari) you just don’t understand my life situation.” She would look up to me, waiting for my condolences…for having lost her alphabets.

She is dead now.

And I have lost her alphabets. I have lost her forgetfulness. Forgetting homework. Not forgetting morning hugs. Not forgetting me.

There is a word “Yasmin” she always spells correctly. And inverted “p’s” and “b’s” in thick pencil lining. She is sleeping now in the curve of the ‘o’ which she writes as a ‘u’, facing an open sky where alphabets need not come to a close. They needn’t stand still, or sit horizontally on a line. They are her alphabets after all, pressed so hard into writing that they fall off pages and escape over her shoulder into a forgetful-ness.

That’s where she is – wrestling the tail of a “g” and arguing with the “w” for looking like a “z”.

They are her alphabets after all.

EvOL,

The thought of representation and gender equality

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There are days for just analyses. Femin Ijtihad has posted two analysis on the thought of representation and gender equality in Islam and Muslim societies. These are some excerpts.

Syed Jamil’s article on the representations of Muslim women in neo-colonial imagination, Islamic canonical texts, and the feminist response.

“…this essay does not seek to establish the ‘Truth’ regarding Muslim women as it exists in the world of social reality. Rather, it seeks to examine how various representations of Muslim women, as networks of signs where the signified is infinitely delayed, are constructed and to what effects and consequence these representations are mobilized” (432).

So long as we confine our conception of the political to activity that is openly declared we are driven to conclude that subordinate groups essentially lack a political life or that what political life they do have is restricted to those moments of popular explosion. To do so is to miss the immense political terrain that lies between quiescence and revolt and that, for better or worse, is the political environment of subject classes. It is to focus on the visible coastline of politics and miss the continent that lies beyond (Scott 1990: 199)’” (438).

“This is the unspoken ground of the unsaid on which patriarchy traces the narrative of women’s subjugation: the existence of a deep-seated and insubordinate – almost subversive – consciousness directed against the patriarchal order” (438).

How can I explain the relationship between gender inequality and Islam?

It’s important to recognize that gender discrimination is not particular to the Islamic world, nor does it reflect essential “Islamic” values or practices. Rather, gender inequality in the Muslim world is often the result of historical, political, cultural, and economic factors, and many discriminatory laws, traditions, and practices that maintain the second-class status of women in Muslim societies are not necessarily related to the core messages of Islamic sacred texts. Therefore, there is no essential reason that  “Islam” and women’s rights can’t exist side by side.

Think about:

- Are discriminatory practices towards women in my community justified as symbols of Islamic identity or explained as key parts of ‘our culture,’ in contrast to Western culture and values? Are women in my community considered guardians of specific Islamic values?

-Who makes the argument that gender inequality is essential to Islam? Why do they feel that making this argument is important, and what are the best ways to approach them?

-What alternatives are there within the Islamic tradition, across all sects, to these interpretations, and how can they be promoted?

-How can I be heard and respected as I participate the debate over ‘what Islam means’ within my community?

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I was so proud of the F.I. team, Sara Bergamaschi, Sarah Jones and Deya Bhattacharya, in their recent representation at the London School of Economics for a panel presentation.

Contemporary debates and historical identities: Evolving conceptions of pluralism in Islam and the future of women’s rights in post-revolutionary Libya

For some contemporary jurists, concepts like ijtihad create space for innovative interpretations of shari’ah, and allow a jurisprudence that protects gender equality. Conservatives resist this as an assault on Islam’s theological purity and historical identity. Through interviews conducted with activists and analyses of the theological structures in Islam that frame this debate over reform, we intend to critique the current state of gender equality in Libya and gauge the potential effects of this intellectual conflict on the political inclusion of Libyan women.