What Killed Shaima Alawadi?

April 4, 2012 By Guest Contributor

This post was written by guest contributor Maheen Nusrat.

On March 24th, 2012, a 32-year-old Iraqi-American woman, Shaima Alawadi, passed away.  She been found three days earlier by her 17-year-old daughter, brutally beaten in her home with a note next to her that said, “Go back to your country, you terrorist.” The story made national headlines, and drew many parallels with the story of Trayvon Martin, a young black man from Florida who was also recently killed for reasons involving race.  Alawadi’s death reflects the large profiling of a particular faith group, and the unchecked issue of Islamophobia. The truth is that being Muslim in America means being under constant suspicion, and fear of being targeted and profiled may keep many Muslims in the US silent on the death of Alawadi. Muslims are portrayed as dangerous infiltrators in the media, and political rhetoric, which causes the general American populace to buy into that hype, even (especially?) when Muslims are portrayed as “normal” human beings, as was seen in some of the reactions to TLC’s All-American Muslim.

Women at a vigil to remember Shaima Alawadi

Women at a vigil to remember Shaima Alawadi. Via The Daily Beast.

In drawing parallels between the Trayvon Martin murder and Shaima Alawadi’s brutal death, Judy Chu, chair of the Congressional Asian Pacific American Caucus, said:

“The tragedy of what happened to Trayvon was a product of racial profiling. Last week, Shaima Alawadi, a 32-year-old Iraq American woman from California, was beaten to death with a tire iron because of racial profiling. One wore a hoodie, and the other wore a hijab, but both were killed due to ignorance.”

Profiling of Muslims is not a big secret. Recently, the NYPD came under scrutiny for its surveillance of Muslims across New York, from campuses, to cafés, to restaurants, to grocery stores and pastry shops. These investigations have often been conducted without leads or reason for suspicion. The investigations have simply been for the fact that these people happened to be Muslims and these neighbourhoods happened to be heavily populated by Muslims.

Less than two weeks prior to Alawadi’s death, on March 11th, 2012 a U.S. sergeant opened fire and killed 17 Afghans, nine of them were children who were asleep in their beds. The sergeant is now under investigation and has been charged with 17 counts of premeditated murder, six counts of attempted murder amongst other charges. Whereas Alawadi’s story has still picked up significant press, the incident in Afghanistan did not gather as much publicity. The silence from the media and the government is another example of side-stepping the issue of Islamophobia and hatred that would provoke a soldier to kill innocent civilians. (It is interesting to note that the U.S. Muslim community has also given much more attention to Alawadi’s story than to these 17 murders in Afghanistan.  The silence from the community may be due to the fact that it has less of an impact on our daily lives than a hate crime committed within the US, or maybe because it requires us to examine the larger arguments about US presence and the war in Afghanistan.)

There are many other incidents of people being targeted by authorities, simply because of a connection to Islam. In May 2010, Pascal Abidor was removed from an Amtrak train heading from Montreal to New York. He was interrogated by customs officers for hours all because he said he was studying Islamic Studies at McGill University. His academic area of study led the officers to think of him as a threat, which led to the confiscation of his laptop and a thorough search of its contents.

On the surface, all of these stories seem to have nothing in common. But on closer inspection, these incidents shed light on what is missing largely from the public discourse:  acknowledgement and denunciation of systemic discrimination and oppression, and of their impact on social lives and people’s identities. The surveillance of the NYPD, the killing of 17 Afghans by a US Sergeant, the removal of an American-French citizen off a train at the U.S.-Canadian border because he is studying Islamic studies, and Shaima Alawadi’s murder are all connected to one another because they stem from a place of mistrust, they feed further into the stereotypes about Muslims, and they contribute towards fueling the hatred against Muslims. [Read more...]

Filed Under: News, Politics Tagged With: , , , ,

First Lady Dictators Are Not Sexy Headlines

April 3, 2012 By sana

Exactly a year ago on March 15th, the official day of Syrian uprising, I wrote about the Vogue feature on Syrian first-lady Asma al-Assad, which glamorized the haute couture-clad co-dictator while painting a painful picture of a woman genuinely fighting, on her own terms, for “democracy” in Syria.  The piece itself could not have been scheduled for a more opportune time: the so-called Arab world was, at the time, experiencing a wave of uprisings challenging old but adamant self-appointed kings who sat on bloodied thrones.

Asma al-Assad

Asma al-Assad with her husband. Image via the Toronto Star.

Both the timing and subject of the piece were, ironically, in extremely bad taste for the premier fashion magazine, coinciding with the “official” start of the democratic uprising in Syria.  It seemed as though those involved in the production of the piece were too enamored by the “enigma” that was Asma al-Assad to condemn (or even pay a semblance of acknowledgment to) her marriage to a dictator and her role in a renowned brutal dictatorship. The compelling confusion that Asma induced, as a white European woman clad in the skin and name of a Muslim, rendered all else irrelevant and insignificant.

And despite the bloody turn the so-called “Arab Spring” has taken in the past few months, particularly in Syria, little has seemed to change in the glorifying characterizations afforded to the wives of ruthless dictators. This especially applies to Asma al-Assad, who remains a proverbial crack-laden fixation.

On March 15th of this year, the Toronto Star celebrated the one year anniversary of the Syrian uprising by publishing a piece (uncomfortably) titled “Real Housewives of the Arab Spring: Dictators’ big-spending spouses draw citizens’ ire.”  The article, written by the Star’s foreign correspondent Olivia Ward, focuses on the un-ending trope of First Lady Dictator Expenditure and is filled to the brim with fascination and tabloid-worthy obsessive commentary. This is all perhaps unsurprising for a piece that actually dares to begin with:

“Asma’s jewels, Safia’s stash, Leila’s family fortune.

They’re the Baronesses of Bling, the Empresses of Excess.”

The article touches upon Egypt’s Suzanne Mubarak, Tunisia’s Leila Trabelsi and Libya’s Safia Farkash. The real protagonist of the piece, however, remains Syria’s Asma al-Assad. Ward notes that al-Assad stands apart from her counterparts, who are currently facing legal backlash for the roles they played in the perpetuation and sustenance of dictatorship and violation of human rights and international law in their respective countries:

“Suzanne Mubarak, wife of former Egyptian president Hosni, is under a European Union arrest warrant on money laundering charges. And Safia Farkash, second wife of Libyan dictator Moammar Gadhafi, was put on a sanctions blacklist by the U.S. Treasury Department, along with other survivors of his regime.

So far, none of that applies to Asma Assad…”

The piece goes on to discuss, with the help of Joshua Landis, the failure of the “great potentiality” that could have been, Asma al-Assad, who apparently was initially seen as “the best thing that happened to Syria,” being the “beautiful Sunni princess” that she was. The gaga-lovefest continues as Landis points out that if there’s anything we have learned about the first lady through the past year and the extremely questionable leaked emails obtained by the Guardian (through the opposition, which must have proven itself trustworthy), it’s that Asma and Bashar “love each other” and that Asma actually seems to believe, like her husband, “that the opposition are Islamic fundamentalists who are going to destroy the harmony of a secular country where all the sects can get along.”

In addition to what a “rose in the desert” (à la Vogue) Asma al-Assad was and could have been, there remains a fixation on her reported lavish spending during the civil conflict that rages across major cities in Syria, despite the shaky evidence this repeated assertion rests upon. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Culture/Society, News, Politics Tagged With: , , , , , ,

The Truth about Shad Begum

April 2, 2012 By merium

When I first considered writing about Pakistan’s Shad Begum, one of the recipients of the 2012 International Women of Courage Award, I was quick to label the event as yet another attempt by American authorities to politicize women’s rights issues in self-serving ways.  Undoubtedly, politicization of Muslim women not only has a colonial legacy but is also increasingly prevalent in Islamist politics in predominantly Muslim nations, making my assumption about the purpose of the award understandable.  After a glance at the bios of the 2012 Courage Award recipients (and those from previous years), I realized what a disservice this assumption was to the achievements of these women in their efforts towards raising awareness on key issues affecting Muslim women in their respective countries.

Shad Begum

Shad Begum. Image via The Express Tribune.

Pakistan’s Shad Begum, along with ten other women, was awarded the US State Department’s 2012 International Women of Courage Award in Washington on 8 March 2012.  The “Courage Award” annually recognizes women around the globe who have shown exceptional courage and leadership in advocating for women’s rights and empowerment, often at great personal risk.  Shad Begum was recognized for her efforts in the areas of political training, microcredit, primary education and health services for women through the Association for Behavior and Knowledge Transformation (ABKT) for which she is the founder and executive director.  She works to improve lives of women in communities of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (a conservative, Taliban-infested region in the North West of Pakistan), and her efforts in Dir are often highlighted and have of late put her life at risk.

Shad Begum is not the only Pakistani to have won this award.  Dr. Begum Jan (also coming from the FATA region like Shad Begum) won in 2008 for her efforts through her organization, the Tribal Women Welfare Association (TWWA), and Ghulam Sughra (from the Southernly Sind province) in 2011 was acknowledged for her role in creating the Marvi Rural Development Organization (MRDO), an NGO focused on creating community savings funds and raising awareness of education, health, human rights, and social development issues.

It is interesting to note that Shad Begum is a political voice in her own right, having contested the district councillor’s election on a Jamaat-e-Islami seat.  It is not impossible to suggest therefore, the State department may have hoped to use Shad Begum’s nomination and subsequent win to highlight Begum’s participation in politics as a positive indicator of Islam’s confluence with women’s political participation.

Many of the recipients of this award come from Muslim majority countries.  For instance, in 2012 alone, seven of the ten recipients were of Muslim origin representing Turkey, Sudan, Saudi Arabia, Maldives, Libya, and Afghanistan including Pakistan.  It is no surprise, therefore, that this information automatically raises the question of whether this award is merely another tool of diplomacy extended by the US administration to further politicize the issue of women’s rights in Pakistan (and the Muslim world) and use it as a barometer for the country’s standard on human rights and freedoms, or whether the award for courage genuinely recognizes the singular efforts of an individual to improve social conditions for the women of her country.  The list of winners also provides evidence of women being awarded for efforts in conflict areas like Sudan, Iraq and Afghanistan. [Read more...]

Filed Under: News, Politics Tagged With: , ,
« Older Posts
Newer Posts »