Wednesday, June 27, 2007

Marina Diaries.. Coming Soon

Dear Bloggers and Readers, I apologize for not writing as frequently as usual. I'm currently on vacation with my family and I said bye bye to my PC in Cairo. Thought I would take some time to relax and forget about all the troubles of daily life, but it seems they will haunt me anywhere. Therefore I shall resume my posts once my vacation ends with the powerful series:


Marina Diaries

Coming Soon to The Edge of Reason

Saturday, June 16, 2007

Kiss My Head and Go to Bed









From Al Masry Al Youm: A New “Sectarian” Clash in Al Wasty Ends with Reconciliation [click to read details]

The way of handling such sorrowful incidents indicates absolute helplessness from the Egyptian governemnt and civil society. What does it mean if a person kisses my head after burning my home, beating me, and injuring my children? What have I gained and what has he learned? Where is the law? Where are the rules which guarantee that this won't happen again? What a pathetic solution this is!


The word "Reconciliation" is even misunderstood and misused. I may reconcile by forgiving a person, but this doesn't mean that he can escape justice and evade the law. The attackers in these cases are criminals who are threatening the safety and wellbeing of society as a whole, not just the group they assaulted. We are all citizens living in a country which has a law that punishes all those criminal acts. What does it mean when a Muslim goes to jail for injuring a Muslim but doesn't when he injures a Christian? What does it mean when those incidents take place one after another in just a small period of time and we still insist that it is enough to kiss heads and go to bed? Are we solving anything? Or are we just contributing to those crimes by letting the attckers get away with their crimes?


If there is a law in this country, it must be put to action and obeyed by everybody. If there is no law, why do we bother by having police, courthouses, jails, and lawyers? Let's set a new law, the head-kissing law: If a person steals, he has to kiss the robbed person 10 kisses. If he kills, he must kiss all the victim's family members. If he burned a house, he kisses the owners... and so on. What is this joke?

Wednesday, June 6, 2007

The Street Is Not Ours

Been listening lately to "The Street is Ours" (Elshare3 Lena). Do you remember this song from Youssef Chahine's famous movie 3awdet el2ebn eldal? Then it occurred to me.. Actually the street isn't ours any more, and by "ours" I mean females. Can you imagine how a girl feels when she walks down the street? It is so weird, that the most public of places became the scariest. No, the street is not ours. We walk down the street as if we are crossing a lake of crocodiles. We speed up as much as we can, that sometimes you can't tell if a girl is walking or running. We expect a sudden attack by anyone, even young school boys who feel that saying a dirty word makes them men. That's because the culture of violence against women has become a horrifying fact in our daily life. It found its manifestation through sexual harassments which are practiced by many, and I mean many boys and men in the streets and means of public transportation.

The cultural shift that Egypt has gone through has unfortunately resulted in a lapse in society's consciousness and its view of women. Women became pounds of flesh walking on two feet. They are just bodies, a means for temptation, which need to be covered up from the eyes of men. But the same theory that was used to justify why we should suddenly all cover up (as if Islam is a discovery of the 21st century) had an opposite effect. Instead of protecting women from those hungry wolves (used to be called men), harassments became a common practice in our streets. We also went as far as witnessing massive harassment attacks during an Islamic feast! Many of the victims of those attacks were veiled girls. The wolves didn't differentiate between covered and uncovered meat. It's all flesh in the end.

The increasing violence against women that we witness nowadays is a result of the inferior position of females in our society. Women are looked down on in such a way which turned them into a means for pleasure. They are not fully human, but sub-humans, in a way which resembles the old ideas which slavery was based upon. Slaves in this context did not have any rights, because if God had cared for them He wouldn't have created them black. The whites at those times saw the slaves as a lesser species. They needed the white man to have a goal in life, that is serving this white man. The same applies to women nowadays, in a culture which stresses the body of the woman either but covering it all up, or over-showing it in indecent music videos which our Arabic channels are full of today.

Sexual harassment takes different shapes and methods. Not all of which has to be by a physical as most people think. Verbal harassment is the most common, cause it doesn't need the victim to be in direct contact with the attacker, it is fast, gives the chance for a quick escape, and the attacker doesn't have to plan it before hand. The verbal sexual attacker can easily turn into a physical sexual predator. But is this verbal harassement categorized as violence? Yes, it is. Because by merely dropping a sexual comment the attacker can not only hurt the feelings of his victim, but also makes her feel afraid and ashamed! It is a kind of terrorism, which makes a girl feel insecure and shaken by a mysterious guilt. It is a very strange thing that victims of sexual harassment bear those feelings of shame and guilt which an attacker ought to have instead. But the image that society keeps feeding up is that a girl is always guilty, even if she is the victim, cause she has the body, the source of temptation.

Our streets won't be safe again until we have the courage to face the problem and talk about it. This problem would never be solved unless a girl is welcomed again into the human species and received the respect she deserves from society.

Saturday, June 2, 2007

www.Egyptians.coma

The title above doesn't have a typo. I got its idea after reading a wonderful article by Ali Al Safar in Modern Discussion. He believes that the Arabs in general are suffering from a coma. I can't agree more. I just wanted to be more specific. I mean no offence, but I think this title best describes how we as Egyptians, builders of the oldest civilization on Earth, have miserably failed to make use of the advantages of modern technology. Not only this, but we insist on living in a cocoon that allows no light or air to get through.

At the time when countries are rushing to achieve their development through science, technology and industrliasation, we watch and consume with our mouths wide open. As if what is happening doesn't concern us. As if we're saying "Shofto elmo3'afaleen.. They keep researching and working to make things that we can easily import and consume here." We then can send SMS to vote for Star Academy (the most famous academy in the Arab world), and send text messages to Melody,and chat for hours, and download videoclips, and download new funky ringtones... etc. Mash2alla. 7aga tefre7!
And aside from this consumption we lie in our own coma, with ideas powerful enough to send us to the Middle Ages with rocket speed. It was painful enough talking about the Mufti's latest fatwa, I felt disgusted to discuss another fatwa by Ezzat Attya concerning breastfeeding adults. I have just stopped by this headline in Al Masry Al Youm: "Disputes Among Members of the Islamic Research Council over the Prophet's Urine and Breastfeeding Adults." When I read the details I was not only buring with rage at those respectful sheikhs who waste their time over such pathetic topics, but my heart was filled with sadness at how our fates became in their hands. This coma we're suffering from seems to be of a severe kind. I'd better get prepared for a long sleep. It seems that I'm not destined to see my country rise and develop during my lifetime. It's my fate to read such topics in the news and be deprived of reading about an Egyptian scientific invention, or an Egyptian medicine, or an Egyptian car, or an Egyptian hosted World Cup, or an Egyptian solution to traffic problems, or anything that will give me something to say to my daughter when she asks me about what was achieved by our country during my lifetime. What do you suggest I say to her?