Hijabi, Shatu Garko, Becomes First Muslim To Win Miss Nigeria Since Its Inception in 1957
19 December 2021
•
Hijabi, Shatu Garko, Becomes First Muslim To Win Miss Nigeria Since Its
Inception in 1957
•
It’s Easier to Wear the Hijab in Moscow than in St. Petersburg or Kazan, Muslim
Residents Say
•
Israeli police detain Palestinian woman accused of stabbing settler
•
Iraq: After Tragedy, New Freedoms, Opportunities For Yazidi Women
•
Uyghur Women In China Labor Camps Recall Horror Of Rape, Forced Sterilization
Compiled by New
Age Islam News Bureau
URL: https://www.newageislam.com/islam-women-feminism/hijabi-shatu-garko-nigeria/d/125987
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Hijabi,
Shatu Garko, becomes first Muslim to win Miss Nigeria Since Its
Inception in 1957
Shatu
Garko, an 18-year-old hijabi the first Muslim to win the Miss Nigeria pagean
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Abiodun
Sanusi
19
December 2021
Shatu
Garko, an 18-year-old hijabi has become the first Muslim to win the Miss
Nigeria pageant since its inception in 1957.
Garko,
who hails from Kano State, was crowned the 44th Miss Nigeria after beating 17
other finalists at an event on Friday, December 17, 2022, in Lagos. She was
also the youngest contestant this year, winning N10m, a one-year residency at a
luxury apartment, a brand new car and brand ambassadorship opportunities.
Speaking
shortly before being crowned Miss Nigeria Garko said, “Winning this competition
means a lot to me. I have always wanted to be a Miss Nigeria. I’d like to thank
Miss Nigeria and its sponsors. I would also like to thank my mum for supporting
and loving me.
Garko
had earlier stated that she loves riding horses and is passionate about proving
that religion and culture are not barriers to following one’s dreams.
Nicole
Ikot was the first runner-up, while Kasarachi Okoro emerged the second
runner-up. The winner of the 2020 edition of the pageant, Etsanyi Tukura, was
present to hand over the crown to her successor at the ceremony.
According
to the organisers, thousands of applications were submitted before it was
pruned down to the top 37 and an additional three wildcard semi-finalists.
Members of the public were also given a chance to contribute to the process of
choosing the 21 finalists who made it into the Miss Nigeria Bootcamp, which was
further cut down to the top 18 finalists.
Source:
Punchng
https://punchng.com/hijabi-shatu-garko-becomes-first-muslim-to-win-miss-nigeria/
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It’s
Easier to Wear the Hijab in Moscow than in St. Petersburg or Kazan, Muslim
Residents Say
December
18, 2021
A woman wearing a hijab
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Paul
Goble
Staunton,
Oct. 30 – Muslim women say it is easier for them to wear the hijab in the
Russian capital than in St. Petersburg where there are few Muslims or in Kazan,
the capital of Tatarstan, where the hijab is viewed by many as a foreign import
rather than part of the national tradition.
Katyra
Dikova of the Muslim feminist site Daptar spoke with four Muslim Muscovites who
said that with only rare exceptions residents of the Russian capital either
ignore their special form of dress or even view it with interest and express
curiosity about Islam and Islamic traditions
(daptar.ru/2021/10/31/hijab-v-moskve/).
Karolina
Pavlovskaya, who has worked in the capital as a stylist for many years,
originally feared she would lose work if she began wearing the hijab. But that
hasn’t happened. Only once did something untoward happen when the police
harassed her. She was ready to give up wearing this Muslim headgear but was
persuaded to continue. She’s had no problems since.
A
second Muslim Muscovite, Elvina, who did not give her last name, says she has
been wearing the hijab only a few months, has had no problems because of it,
and thinks the reason is that there are lots of Muslims in the capital and
people have gotten used to the idea. Any discrimination she is victim of is
only what “anyone with a non-Slavic visage” gets.
A
third Muslim, Bella, says she started wearing the hijab when the pandemic
began. Because so many were covering their faces to protect against covid, few
have taken notice of her doing so. She said that the only time she has had
difficulties is when she has travelled to St. Petersburg which has fewer
Muslims and is less comfortable with them.
And
a fourth, “N,” says the pandemic has had another impact on her. She only wears
her hijab when she is not wearing a mask. She adds that she is more aware of
the boorish behavior of people from Central Asia who make assumptions about her
when they see she is a Muslim because of her headgear.
Source:
windowoneurasia2
http://windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2021/12/its-easier-to-wear-hijab-in-moscow-than.html
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Israeli
police detain Palestinian woman accused of stabbing settler
AFP
December
18, 2021
JERUSALEM:
A Palestinian woman on Saturday stabbed an Israeli settler near a disputed holy
site in Hebron in the southern occupied West Bank, wounding him slightly, a
border guard spokesperson said.
The
attack took place near a flashpoint site known to Jews as the Cave of the
Patriarch and to Muslims as the Ibrahimi mosque, a place revered by both
faiths.
Source:
arab News
https://www.arabnews.com/node/1989046/middle-east
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Iraq:
After tragedy, new freedoms, opportunities for Yazidi women
Cathrin
Schaer
18.12.2021
"We
really appreciate your visit," Luqman Suleiman told a group of tourists
from around Iraq and Germany recently, when he met them at the entrance of the
Yazidi temple, Lalish. For the ethno-religious Iraqi minority this site in
northern Iraq is the equivalent of the Vatican to Catholics, or Mecca to
Muslims. Every Yazidi is expected to come here at least once in their lifetime.
And these days, more outsiders are coming here too.
"It
is really so important that people come here and listen to the Yazidis,"
Suleiman, a spokesperson and guide at the temple, said. "You shouldn't
listen to other people. They may speak falsely about us."
Suleiman
was talking about long-standing prejudices against his community in Iraq. Their
highly secretive and ritualistic religion — traditions and rules are passed on
orally and outsiders are prohibited from knowing most of them — has made the
minority a target of the Muslim majority in the country.
A
stall inside the entrance to the Lalish temple in northern Iraq, selling
souvenirs to a group of visitors from Iraq and Europe. The spokesperson for the
temple, Luqman Suleiman, can be seen facing the camera, second from the left.
The
Yazidi faith has been described as "dualist" because they believe
that good and evil are part of the same divinity. This is also why some Iraqis
have described them as "devil worshippers" and, for example, won't
eat any food prepared by Yazidi hands.
It
is the same sort of prejudice that made the small religious community, which is
thought to number around half a million inside Iraq, a target for the extremist
group known as the "Islamic State" (IS). As the extremists took over swathes of the
country in 2014, the minority's marginal status was part of the reason why the
IS militants felt they could kill, rape and enslave thousands of members of the
community with impunity.
The
Yazidi minority was forever changed by the IS group's brutal assault on them.
By the time the extremists were more or less pushed out of northern Iraq in
2017, thousands of Yazidis had been killed or kidnapped. Several international
bodies now classify the events as a genocide. Today, around 240,000 are still
living in camps for the displaced, many in grinding poverty.
"The
Yazidi community has transformed toward more openness," said Murad Ismael,
head of the Sinjar Academy, an institute in northern Iraq providing education
to locals in the area. "The Yazidi community has nothing to hide but I
believe, in the past, many thought it was better to not discuss identity or
faith. I also think the world today is more passionate and supportive to the
Yazidis, which encourages them to be more open."
"Before
the IS group came, a woman was not free to leave her village without a male
guardian," Suleiman said. "But after the IS time, people have more of
an open mind. Women can leave their village and catch a plane to Europe, if they
want to," he said, smiling and gesturing at the sky above the hills
surrounding the 4,000-year-old temple.
"In
the past, the community would not have accepted that," confirmed Naven
Symoqi, a Yazidi activist and journalist from Sinjar, the district where many
Iraqi Yazidis reside. " But after many Yazidis became displaced, they
ended up in different parts of Iraq and they saw different ways of doing
things."
That
experience, said a local in northern Iraq, who worked with Yazidis in a
displaced persons' camp, has had impact. "Imagine if you come from a
really isolated agricultural community without many resources, where many
people were not educated beyond primary school level. And then you've been
displaced, you're in a camp, and there are all these NGOs running programs on
education and women's rights," the source told DW. The person requested
anonymity in order to speak candidly about the community with which they still
work.
Symoqi
marvels at the fact there are now driving schools for women in town. She also
knows of Yazidi women studying at universities and praises Amera Atto, a Yazidi
who competed in 2021's Miss Iraq contest.
Yazidi
women involved in local survivor networks are also doing things they never
would have before, such as traveling to cities to meet male politicians to
discuss justice and compensation.
Because
of the murders of their male relatives, many Yazidi women became heads of their
own households, pointed out Abid Shamdeen, executive director of Nadia's
Initiative.
His
nonprofit organization, founded by Nadia Murad, a Yazidi survivor and Nobel
Peace Prize recipient, has been able to help Yazidi women set up their own
small businesses, rebuild homes and access education. "We have seen that
these kinds of projects have a profoundly positive impact on Yazidi
women," Shamdeen told DW. "After IS' destruction, Yazidi women have
very much taken the lead in advocating on behalf of their community, both
locally and globally."
Yazidi
women are also benefiting from better access to education and job
opportunities, the Sinjar Academy's Ismael added. "There are more women
employed and some even own small businesses or lead NGOs. This is really
something new to the Yazidis of Iraq."
Despite
it's awful origins, this new attitude could be seen as a positive development.
The Yazidi religion has strict rules. You cannot convert into it, nor can you
leave it. Adherents may not even marry out of their own caste within the
community, let alone outside of the religion.
In
one high-profile case from 2007, Dua Khalil Aswad, a young Yazidi woman, who
was thought to have converted to Islam for love was beaten to death in public,
including by members of her own family.
In
2011, after a growing number of suicides among young Yazidi females,
researchers from the International Organization for Migration conducted
community interviews to find out why this was happening. They concluded
"the marginalization of women and the view of the woman's role as
peripheral" were to blame, alongside isolation, unhappy arranged marriages,
unemployment among females and community and sectarian tensions.
For
one thing, the former camps worker explained, there's still a big difference
between the way Yazidi survivors and other women in the community are treated.
A
woman mourns by a grave during a mass funeral for Yazidi victims of the Islamic
State group whose remains were found in a mass grave, in the northern Iraqi
village of Kojo.
"Some
are welcomed back by their families, others are not. Although the community
doesn't like to talk about it like this, it's a bit of a disaster," the
source said. "And all this [the new rights Yazidi women have] is still
only possible with the permission of male family members. It's still deeply
patriarchal here. Then again," they concluded, " these things take
time. And once people are given opportunities, it's very hard to take them away
again."
"Definitely
there is still some social friction," Ismael agreed. "It will take
time and education," he argued. "But I think in many ways Yazidi
women led by example, during and after the genocide. [They] were at the
forefront of everything that happened and in many ways became symbols of the
people."
Source:
Dw.com
https://www.dw.com/en/new-freedoms-yazidi-women/a-60130898
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Uyghur
women in China labor camps recall horror of rape, forced sterilization
By
Michael Kaplan
December
18, 2021
In
2017, Tursunay Ziyawudun was arrested off the street in northern China’s
Xinjiang region, forced by police officers to turn over her passport and taken
to a prison camp about 30 minutes from her village. There, she was made to sing
communist songs of patriotism and repeatedly told that her Muslim religion does
not exist. After a month, she developed stomach issues, fainted and was
released.
“They
sent me to the hospital,” Ziyawudun, who came to the United States as a
political refugee in 2020, told The Post. “If they hadn’t I might have died.”
The
year after she was arrested off the street, still in China, she was summoned to
a police station and told that she needed to complete her training. She was
sent back to the “re-education” camp, where her hair was shorn — likely to be
sold as a wig — and her earrings were ripped out. “They pulled it so hard that
my ears were bleeding,” Ziyawudun recalled. “I was being treating like an
animal.”
Breaking
down and crying, she said: “I was gang-raped and my private parts were tortured
with electricity. You’re left with marks on your body that make you not want to
look at yourself.”
Her
story is, tragically, not uncommon for members of the minority Uyghur religion,
with Turkish roots, in President XI Jinping’s China. Since around 2016, they
have been pulled off the street and sent to reeducation camps — where reports
have surfaced about people being tortured, raped and even killed. They are sent
there under the auspices of learning a trade and having their patriotism
reinforced.
On
Thursday, the US Senate followed the House’s lead in passing the Uyghur Forced
Labor Prevention Act, which promises to ban imports coming from the Xinjiang
region — home to some 12 million Uyghur people — unless there is proof the
goods were not produced by forced labor. It’s now waiting to be signed by
President Biden.
Amelia
Pang, author of “Made in China: A Prisoner, an SOS Letter, and the Hidden Cost
of America’s Cheap Goods,” acknowledged that the act is a huge deal that “hurts
China’s plan. China has invested a lot of money into making an important trade
route [that goes through Xinjiang] a key part of what is called its Belt and
Road Initiative. It’s a trillion-dollar project to connect China to Central
Asia and Europe and the Middle East. It’s almost too big to fail.
But
she pointed out that, to be effective, the act needs the teeth of corporate
executives: According to a study published by the Australian Strategic Policy
Institute, companies such as Nike, BMW and Apple use components and materials
produced directly or indirectly by forced labor.
“The
supply chain is murky … and there is not a whole lot of accountability,” Pang
told The Post, adding that large corporations often look the other way and
avoid asking the right questions. “They need to think about whether the money
they are paying [for manufacturing] can realistically meet the wages from that
region. Factories follow the bottom line and outsource to prison camps where
workers are basically slave labor.”
An
Apple spokesman told The Post, “We conducted over 1,100 audits, including
surprise audits, and interviewed more than 57,000 workers to insure that our
standards are upheld … We have found no evidence of forced labor anywhere in
our supply chain.” Representatives for Nike and BMW did not respond to requests
for comment.
The
next time you’re tempted to purchase a pair of leather gloves made in China,
think of Gulzira Auelkhan. She spent two and a half months in a forced labor
camp near the country’s northern border, working for pennies per hour stitching
gloves.
“There
were cameras and police and you could not sit,” she told The Post. “I worked
constantly, 14 hours a day, and was yelled at so much that it began to feel
normal.”
Amazingly,
what kept Auelkhan, who received political asylum in the United States earlier
this year, from slowing down on the assembly line was a fear that she would be
relieved of her labor.
“If
you said you did not want to work, you went back to the [prison] camp, where
you would be tortured,” she said. “I felt like a slave but it was better than
being in the other camp.”
Indeed,
Ziyawudun recalled the looming threat of being summoned to a space that women
in her prison camp referred to as “the dark room.”
“We
were all scared of it. When the police wanted to threaten us, they’d say they
were going to take us to that room,” Ziyawudun said. “Anything you can think
of, including rape, takes place in that room.”
Pang
is not surprised: “Rape is pretty standard in forced labor camps,” she said.
“The goal is to brainwash prisoners into being patriotic and extremely aligned
with the Chinese state.”
Bob
Fu, founder and president of China Aid, an organization with the mission of
advancing religious freedom in China, was told by a former prisoner that the
sexual brutality comes with a commercial component.
“We
rescued a woman who was eyewitness to a program that the government organized
for prostitution,” Fu told The Post. “She was handcuffed to the bed, the man
did his thing and she cried. She said she heard the man shouting and
complaining that he had paid good money for this and she was crying.”
Fiendishly
convenient for the Chinese, according to Kuzzat Altay, CEO of Cydeo, an
international software-coding boot camp, the use of forced labor in hundreds of
camps and factories scattered around the country allows the Chinese government
to undercut manufacturing costs around the world.
“China
keeps prices low and Americans keep buying Chinese products cheaply,” said
Altay, a former resident of Xinjiang who moved to America in 2008 and is an
outspoken opponent of the country’s human right abuses.
“China’s
entire supply chain of manufacturing involves forced labor. They make shoes,
pants, solar panels in these forced-labor factories,” he told The Post. “The
Chinese economy is a vehicle for oppression and a source of influence in
Silicon Valley, Hollywood and Wall Street. That money comes from slavery.”
Altay’s
67-year-old father was kept in a prison camp for two years, held there,
supposedly, so the government could teach him a trade that could help the
Communist Party.
Fortunately.
Altay’s father emerged with his organs intact. “Organ harvesting is normal in
the Chinese Communist Party,” Altay said. “They are known for this. There are
some rich Middle Eastern clients who want Muslim kidneys” — which are free of
alcohol and pork. “So Uyghur people were having their kidneys taken.”
In
2019, a group called the China Tribunal offered testimony to the United Nations
Human Rights Council, maintaining that “forced organ harvesting from prisoners
of conscience has been committed for years throughout China on a significant
scale.”
Altay
views this as more than pure cruelty — saying it’s also a form of slow-motion
genocide. “The women get sterilized because the Chinese government wants to
minimize the Uyghur population,” he said. “Right now the population growth is
almost zero percent. In 10 years it will be zero.”
Pang
believes that the way to help put a stop to all of it is for Western consumers
to stop buying goods that have been made with forced labor — a movement she
calls “ethical consumerism” — and for the Nikes of the world to respond
appropriately.
“If
it’s not lucrative for the Chinese factories to use forced labor, if they can
lose major contracts,” she said, “it will have an impact on these camps.”
And
it will allow American manufacturers to compete on a more level playing field.
As Altay put it: “You buy something made in China, you are giving China a
bullet to shoot back to America.”
Source:
Nypost
https://nypost.com/2021/12/18/uyghur-women-recall-horrors-of-chinas-labor-camps/
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URL: https://www.newageislam.com/islam-women-feminism/hijabi-shatu-garko-nigeria/d/125987