November 23, 2009

Away for holidays

Greetings!

I'm in the States for the Eid/Thanksgiving holidays, so there won't be any posts for the next few days. But here's some amusing reading if you have some free time over the long weekend. Thanks to a colleague, AVM, for the heads-up on the Egyptastic page.

I browsed the Egyptastic online store and I really want the mug that reads, "Zamalek: Like Egypt, With Fewer Egyptians," but I wasn't sure whether the whole site was a parody or whether you could really buy the T-shirt that says, "Zahi Hawass Announced My Discovery." The T-shirt is advertised as "a great ice breaker at conferences and symposia."

See you in a week.

November 14, 2009

Egypt's noisy soccer win

As I write this, after midnight, Cairo sounds as if it's under siege.

Fireworks are exploding, police sirens are blaring, horns are honking, music is thumping and at least six processions of young men with drums have passed noisily in front of my building. Sporadic gunfire is keeping the whole block's residents in from their balconies.

Tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of Egyptians are flooding the streets draped in the red, white and black of the national flag and generally whooping it up. They have reason to celebrate: the Egyptian national soccer team beat archrival Algeria tonight in a World Cup qualifier. The two teams will play again Wednesday in Sudan.

"This is what a revolution could look like," an Egyptian friend observed, wistfully, of the fervor in the streets.

But this was all about soccer, or "football" as it's known here and everywhere else besides the United states. There's an ugly history behind this particular match, which you can read in this ESPN story and this one from AFP. Riots broke out after an infamous Egypt-Algeria match in 1989.

Security forces swarmed the street and traffic was severely restricted in several places long before the match today. Vendors walked through traffic jams, selling Egyptian flags. I heard that some fans spent the night before in line at the stadium, to guarantee their seats for the main event.

I haven't heard whether things turned violent in the streets tonight (the latest AP story notes that it was fairly peaceful), but things were looking ominous before the game began. Egyptians threw rocks at the bus carrying the visiting Algerian team from the airport, injuring three players. The Egyptian press then further mocked the team by writing that the whole story was made up by the Algerians.

One of the best parts of the feverish lead-up to the big match today was a "peace concert" in Cairo jointly headlined by two of the most popular North African singers, Cheb Khaled and Mohammad Mounir.

Here's a YouTube clip from the concert:

November 12, 2009

Divorce in Egypt

CNN has an interesting online report about Egyptian women breaking a longstanding taboo and talking openly about divorce. The reporter says that the proliferation of TV programs, radio shows and blogs about marriage-related issues has helped to ease the stigma still associated with divorce throughout much of the Middle East.

CNN reports that nearly 40 percent of all marriages in Egypt end in divorce, according to 2008 figures from the Central Agency for Public Mobilization and Statistics. That means Egypt has the highest divorce rate in the Arab world.

Highlights from the report:

Once considered taboo to discuss in public, private relationships between men and women are now the hot topic of television talk shows, radio programs and blogs. Mahasen Saber, host of Divorce Radio, says that her program is helping to break the stigma.

"People are shocked at first, but after they read and listen to what we write and present, they like what we talk about...they are happy because I am talking about something they are dealing with" Saber told CNN.

Earlier this year she launched the radio show to complement her blog called "I Want A Divorce."

Sex enters the picture:

Dr. Heba Kotb is a leading sexologist in Cairo who appears regularly on TV. She has two PHD's, one in sexuality from the University of Florida, and she considers herself a conservative Muslim. Dr. Kotb attributes 80 percent of divorce in Egypt to sexual problems.

"In most cases couples simply don't know how to deal sexually with their partner," she told CNN. "I provide the information -- this is right, this is wrong, you should do this."

Egypt's divorce laws:

In Egypt marriage falls under family law, which is based on Shari'a, Islamic religious law, and which gives men and women unequal rights to a divorce.

"In Islamic Shari'a, a man can divorce his wife at any time, in any place, and for any or no reason by simply uttering the following words: "I divorce you, I divorce you, I divorce you," explained Gabriel Sawma an attorney specializing in Muslim divorce law and professor at Farleigh Dickinson University.

Women, on the other hand, can get a divorce only through court action, in a much more formal legal process.

In 2000, Egypt liberalized their laws, granting women the right to initiate a "no-fault" divorce (khula). Though this is considered a step forward, women are still required through khula to relinquish any claim to alimony or their dowry.

November 11, 2009

Life sentence for killer of veiled woman

Egypt welcomed the sentence of life in prison -- the maximum penalty for murder under German law -- for the man convicted of stabbing to death a pregnant Egyptian woman who was testifying against him in court.

The death of Marwa al Sherbini in a German courtroom in July enraged and captivated Muslims, particularly Egyptians, many of whom blame Germany for fueling an anti-Muslim climate there. But the stiff sentence handed down Wednesday by a German judge earned praise from many Egyptians who described the ruling as just and impartial.

  "We are very satisfied with the verdict," Ramzy Ezzedin Ramzy, Egypt's ambassador to Berlin, told the Times of London. "The maximum sentence was demanded and the maximum sentence was awarded."

The case began last year on a Dresden playground when Sheribini asked Alexander Wiens, a Russian of ethnic German origin, to move from a swing so her 3-year-old son could use it. Wiens started to scream at Sherbini, who was wearing a headscarf, and accused her of being an Islamist and a terrorist. Sherbini pressed charges of slander against Wiens, who received a fine. He appealed and sought to bring the case before a judge.

Sherbini was three months pregnant when the case came to court. She was accompanied by her husband, a microbiologist, and their young son. Inside the courtroom, Wiens took a long knife from under his jacket and stabbed Sherbini 18 times, according to news accounts. Her husband was stabbed 16 times while trying to stop the attack.

Things got even worse when a security officer responding to the scene misread what was happening and shot the husband instead of Wiens. The husband was wounded, but survived. Sherbini's 3-year-old son witnessed the grisly episode. As news of the murder spread, Muslims held protests in Germany and elsewhere in Europe and the Middle East.

Al Arabiya interviewed Sherbini's relatives in Egypt, who told the channel they were satisfied with the life sentence for Wiens. However, they also demanded punishment for the security officer and the judge, saying the men shared in the responsibility for failing to protect Sherbini inside a court of law. Her father, Ali al Sherbini, told Arabiya: "My phone didn't stop ringing once the verdict was issued. People congratulated us and praised God for having mercy on her."

Sherbini's case became a rallying point for proponents of the veil, which is worn by the majority of Egyptian women but remains a controversial topic throughout the Islamic world. Because she was killed while defending her right to practice Islam, many clerics deemed her a "martyr." The Western press took to calling her the "veil martyr" in headlines.

Muslim governments seized on the incendiary case to make political points. Perhaps the most noteworthy was Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad during a tense interview with Katie Couric. Couric was pressing Ahmadinejad on the highly publicized death of a young Iranian activist, and he fired back by producing a photo of Sherbini. He asked Couric if he knew who the woman in the photo was.

Couric didn't know, and Ahmadinejad used the moment as an illustration of the Western media's double standards. You can read the details of the interview here.

November 10, 2009

Troubling death trend in Lebanon

Last month was particularly deadly for young Asian and African women employed by Lebanese families as domestic help.

On Oct. 8, a Nepalese woman named Sunit Bholan committed suicide. A week later, a 23-year-old Ethiopian woman named Kassaye Etsegenet jumped to her death from the 7th floor of an apartment building in Beirut. Five days after that, the body of another Ethiopian, Zeditu Kebede Matente, 26, was found hanging from an olive tree.

Five other women died before the end of October, two more Ethiopians, another Nepalese maid, and two women from Madagascar, according to a report this week from the Beirut office of Human Rights Watch. That's a total of eight in one month.

Human Rights Watch (HRW) is calling on the Lebanese government to investigate the "disproportionately high death rate among this group of workers," according to a news release. An estimated 200,000 domestic workers, primarily from Sri Lanka, work in Lebanon. Last year, HRW published a study showing that migrant domestic workers were dying at a rate of more than one a week in Lebanon.

The rate of suicides and mysterious fatal falls apparently is worrying governments with high numbers of workers in Lebanon.

A diplomat for a country from which one of the dead women came told HRW: "These women are under pressure, with no means to go away. Their passports are seized and they are often locked away in their employer's house. It is like they are living in a cage. Human beings need to mingle with others; otherwise they lose their will to live."

Throughout the Middle East and North Africa, it's common for middle- and upper-class families to employ housemaids, gardeners, nannies and doormen. Their pay is low, but enough to support the domestic workers' families back home in Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Eritrea and the Philippines.

While many families treat their hired help as in any employer-worker relationship, with time off for home visits and set working hours, abuses have become so frequent that human rights groups are calling for greater legal protection and more government enforcement of existing labor laws.

Without reforms, many domestic workers will remain vulnerable and trapped, modern-day slaves.