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Islam, Women and Feminism ( 12 Aug 2022, NewAgeIslam.Com)

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Iraqi Actress Enas Taleb To Sue The Economist For Using Her Photo In ‘Fat Women’ Article

New Age Islam News Bureau

12 August 2022

• Iran's Hijab Wars Escalate As 'Hijab And Chastity Day' Sparks Angry Backlash

• Palestinian Girl Succumbs To Wounds Sustained In Israel's Attack On Gaza

• Israeli Entrepreneurship Program Empowers Bedouin Women

• Empowering Arab Women Goes Beyond Holding Public Positions, Says Hania Sholkamy

Compiled by New Age Islam News Bureau

URL:   https://newageislam.com/islam-women-feminism/iraqi-actress-enas-taleb-economist/d/127701

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Iraqi Actress Enas Taleb To Sue The Economist For Using Her Photo In ‘Fat Women’ Article

 

Enas Taleb was pictured at the Babylon International Festival

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11 August, 2022

Renowned Iraqi actress Enas Taleb told Al Arabiya that she will sue British newspaper The Economist for publishing a picture of her in reference to a story about “fat women” in the Arab world.

“I am demanding compensation for the emotional, mental and social damage this incident has caused me,” she said.

The 42-year-old actress said that the image was used out of context and without permission. She also claimed that the image was photoshopped.

The article, titled ‘Why Women Are Fatter Than Men in the Arab World,’ is at the center of Taleb’s legal claim. It claims that poverty and society are the reasons behind overweight women in the Arab world.

The article was published on July 28 and the main image used carries the watermark of the American visual media company that licenses stock pictures, Getty Images.

The image was reportedly taken nine months ago at the Babylon International Festival in Iraq.

The article has faced strong criticism on social media for being racist and sexist.

Al Arabiya English has reached out to The Economist for comment.

The Iraqi actress and talk show host also told Al Arabiya that she had faced “bullying comments” on social media.

She also called the article an “insult to the Arab woman in general and Iraqi women in particular,” asking why the publication took interest in women in the Arab world “and not in Europe or the USA.”

“They did not know that I’m a celebrity and a public figure,” she said, adding that “I can turn crises into gains.”

She shared a video on her Instagram account, which has nine million followers, in which her British lawyer talked about “the defamation case against The Economist.”

“Today I have issued a letter of claim on behalf of my client demanding apology on her behalf for serious harm caused to her and her career by publication of her photograph,” the lawyer said.

Iraqi MP and former cabinet minister Evan Gabro urged solidarity with Taleb “after the insult to her and to Iraqi and Arab women.”

“The Iraqi woman will remain majestic and beautiful in the eyes of the world,” she said.

Zahraa Ghandour, an Iraqi actress and filmmaker, also denounced “the arrogant perspective of the Western media” which she said has a tendency to “reinforce stereotypes.”

Source: Al Arabiya

https://english.alarabiya.net/News/middle-east/2022/08/11/Iraq-s-Enas-Taleb-to-sue-The-Economist-for-using-her-photo-in-fat-women-article

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Iran's Hijab Wars Escalate As 'Hijab And Chastity Day' Sparks Angry Backlash

 

Representative Photo

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11 August, 2022

Controversy over the compulsory hijab law in Iran returned to centre stage, after a series of campaigns – some supporting the mandatory hijab policy and others fighting it.

Meanwhile, Iran's "morality police" are back in force on the country's streets, ready to confront those who refuse to comply and whose appearance is being described as "un-Islamic" according to Iran's authorities, who have also organised official media campaigns to undermine the anti-hijab protesters.

Iran's inaugural "Hijab and Chastity Day": Mixed reactions

Iranian women who reject the mandatory hijab policy responded to Iran's first Hijab and Chastity Day, held on 12 July 2022, by launching the "NoToHijab" campaign. Some filmed video clips of themselves removing their headscarves and posted these on Iranian social media networks as well as overseas channels affiliated with Iranian dissident groups.

However, Iranian women who support the hijab policy organised counter-demonstrations in support of the decision to hold the Hijab and Chastity day in several cities. Meanwhile, conservative Iranian media outlets expressed scepticism regarding the veracity of the videos posted of women removing the veil in Iran as part of the "NoToHijab" campaign.

A number of local officials have also made demands that women who don't adhere to the full Islamic veil shouldn't be allowed to continue to work in public institutions and should be prevented from using public services like the metro.

Women's right to choose

Azita lives in Tehran. She supports the "NoToHijab" campaign and says to Al-Araby Al-Jadeed, The New Arab's Arabic-language sister publication: "Women have the right to choose what they wear, and there must be freedom on this. I hate the idea of forcing anything on any person against their will. The campaign isn't calling for anyone to strip naked – just for removing the head covering."

She continues: "Why have the police patrols returned to the streets? Have they managed to solve all our problems then, apart from the way a woman veils herself? My mother wears the hijab and covers her head totally, but I want to live in my own way, and my convictions are different to hers."

Question of hijab hijacked by politics

As for Mariam, who lives on Keshavarz Boulevard in Tehran, she wears a full-length black chador but rejects what she views as the "politicisation of the hijab", believing that "the actions and the reactions over the subject of wearing hijab don’t serve Islam, and the matter has stopped having anything to do with religion – it has now become a matter governed predominantly by politics and the media".

She adds: "Certain channels abroad are encouraging Iranian women to remove the hijab as a way of showing opposition to the ruling regime, but they either don't realise or are ignoring, the fact that this is pitting people against each other."

She points to the fights which broke out recently between women wearing headscarves and those not wearing them in public places which were caught on video and posted on social media.

She puts the rising tensions down to the fact that the "veil has been removed from its original context, which is that it is a religious question, and is based on conviction and cannot be imposed by force – in the same way, it can't be removed by force, or with political and media campaigns."

Iran's hijab policy history

After the Islamic revolution in 1979, Iranian women were forced to wear the Islamic veil outside the house. Under Article 638 of the Iranian Penal Code, women who appear in public without the Islamic veil may be fined up to the equivalent of $20, be sentenced to ten days to two months in prison, or be flogged up to 74 times.

However, in practice, this law is not implemented against women who don't wear the Islamic veil (which entails full coverage of the head and body) but is implemented against those who break the regulations of wearing the customary veil, familiar in Iran, and which the authorities accept, which includes partial covering of the head and allows some of the hair to show.

Recently, videos have gone viral on social media showing cases of morality police violence against unveiled women. Among them was a video clip taken just weeks ago showing a distraught woman screaming at a patrol that her daughter was ill to try to stop them from arresting her. The video caused outrage on social media and subsequently, the police announced that the behaviour of the patrol in question had been against regulations and that the officer in charge of the unit responsible had been punished.

Video clips of arguments, which sometimes escalate into physical fights, between veiled and non-veiled women on buses and the metro have also circulated through online networks.

Roqiye says she supports hijab-wearing women who "promote virtue": "The veil is a religious and legal duty, and trying to remove it violates the law and should be challenged. The women involved in the "NoToHijab" campaign are linked to the enemies of religion and of the Islamic Republic, and they want to change the religious culture of the people and their Islamic convictions."

She defended the presence of the morality police squads on the streets in order to confront "un-Islamic appearances", but was keen that the mistakes sometimes made by these patrols while enforcing the law should be addressed.

Morality police experiment has been counterproductive

Student Fereshteh Fatabadi who is in her twenties takes a different view. Standing in front of Tehran University, she states: "The experiment of running morality police patrols over the last few decades has not been good, and has been counterproductive in terms of results. I believe the ever-recurring debate about the hijab – which fades and reappears anew with the suspension of these patrols and then their return to the streets – has to end."

For their part, Iranian official and semi-official news agencies have played down the significance of the "NoToHijab" campaign. Nour News, a news outlet close to Iran's Supreme National Security Council, wrote that "Data indicates that the hashtag #NoToHijab was only used a little, less than 6,000 times."

The news agency accused "overseas opponents of the revolution" of launching the campaign, insisting: that "a large proportion of the accounts promoting this hashtag are fake".

Iranian Minister of Culture and Islamic Guidance Mohammad Mahdi Esmaili warned of a division in society over the hijab, and accused Iran's enemies of "seeking to create this division". However, former Iranian officials called for a change to the way the hijab issue is dealt with in Iran, stressing that wearing the hijab is a cultural matter, and should be treated as such, rather than through the lens of security and threat of punishment.

Source: The New Arab

https://english.alaraby.co.uk/features/iran-hijab-and-chastity-day-provokes-notohijab-campaign

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Palestinian girl succumbs to wounds sustained in Israel's attack on Gaza

11 August 2022

A Palestinian girl seriously injured in the latest Israeli aggression on the besieged Gaza Strip has succumbed to the wounds she sustained during recent Israel strikes on the besieged Gaza Strip.

Layan al-Shaer, 10, was critically injured after Israeli missiles hit a residential neighborhood in the city of Beit Hanoun last Friday.

She was transferred to Al-Maqased hospital in al-Quds on Tuesday and was in a critical condition and in a state of clinical. The girl died in the hospital on Thursday.

Her death brings to 48 the number of Gazans killed during the three-day Israeli onslaught on the besieged territory. Four women and 17 children are among the dead while some 360 people were wounded.

On Friday, the Israeli regime carried out a new massacre in Gaza, killing dozens of people, including Taysir al-Jabari, a senior commander of the Palestinian resistance movement Islamic Jihad, and six children.

The Israeli airstrikes prompted the al-Quds Brigades, the Islamic Jihad’s military wing, to respond by firing hundreds of rockets toward the occupied territories, pushing the regime forces on the back foot.

The strong retaliation, as was pledged by the resistance group, forced Tel Aviv to demand a ceasefire in order to prevent maximum damage. The Egyptian-mediated truce took effect late Sunday.

Source: Press TV

https://www.presstv.ir/Detail/2022/08/11/687187/Palestine-Israel-Gaza-girl-Layan-al-Shaer-

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Israeli entrepreneurship program empowers Bedouin women

08.11.22

The community center in Rahat – Israel's largest Bedouin town – is enabling women who dream of setting up their own businesses to do so.

Funded by the Israeli government’s budget allocated to the country’s Arab sector, the Women's Empowerment Program is giving women of the Arab town the opportunity to emancipate themselves and acquire their independence.

In Israel, the rate of unemployed Arab women is particularly high, at 60 percent, something Rahat is working to change for those who aspire to succeed.

The program is divided into two categories – one is dedicated to women who have businesses and want to market their brands; the other is for women who want to work in social entrepreneurship.

About thirty event centers are hosting 20 meetings per week, during which participants are learning the basics of the business world, but also the laws of the market and of competition.

At the end of the program, the participants will present their projects to a panel, which will select the three most useful products or services for Rahat. The three “winners” will then be given special funding for their fruition.

"Our goal is to help women who have the potential and the desire to create their own business by offering them all the keys to carrying it out,” said Sabrin Abu Sukot, who is responsible for the women of the program.

“It’s about seeing more and more women business leaders in Rahat, to encourage them when they have an initiative and to prove to them that they can succeed by showing them examples of other women who have been there,” Sukot continued.

“We want to tell them that they are not alone in their approach and that we are providing solutions.”

The ideas of the participants range from design to event organization, sports and cooking classes, clothing companies and digital marketing.

“We have a real demand from women in Rahat to integrate our project, we feel that many of them want to set up their company,” said program coordinator Islam Abu Medigam.

“More women have more private companies and know what they want. There there is a real change today in Rahat; women used to work in the family business and were only there to help. Now they are taking matters into their own hands.”

Rahat, located in Israel’s southern Negev desert, is home to approximately 77,000 people. Many programs launched by the community center allow the development of culture, tourism, or sports, and offer many activities to young people.

“This year, we opened six special summer camps in different fields: English, ecology, culture, Quranic studies and values, science, and technology,” said Foad Elziadna, director of the Rahat community center.

"More than 1000 young people were able to benefit from the camps for 10 days. I believe that every child has talent, you just have to give them the tools.”

Long stigmatized and victim of clichés around honor killing, violence, and theft, Rahat is gradually trying to restore its image with initiatives that promote youth and women, by encouraging the development of their talents.

Source: Y Net News

https://www.ynetnews.com/magazine/article/hy00j1amr5

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Empowering Arab Women Goes Beyond Holding Public Positions, Says Hania Sholkamy

Amr EL-Tohamy

06 Aug 2022

Empowering Arab women is about more than putting more women into leadership positions, says the Egyptian anthropologist Hania Sholkamy. It’s also a matter of achieving socio-economic justice for marginalised women who are unable to access economic benefits or public services.

“I call for the liberation of women empowerment from the dominance of one voice or the interpretation of certain theoretical trends,” says Sholkamy, an associate research professor in the American University in Cairo’s Social Research Center. “That’s to avoid limiting efforts to support women to quantitative aspects that focus on their holding public positions only.”

Sholkamy’s views on the issue were shaped by years of research and fieldwork on poverty and the needs of marginalised Arab women and their families.

The stereotypes surrounding the concept of women’s empowerment in the Arab world are due to “the fact that Arab feminist discourses echo discourses in other worlds,” she says.

In a Zoom interview, Sholkamy told Al-Fanar Media that empowering women is about achieving social and human justice, which is a basic entry point for human liberation in general.

Anthropology is the methodology that should govern understanding women’s priorities through experiencing their conditions, Sholkamy said.

“It is also the main determinant that shapes the policies to be implemented to empower women,” she added. “Feminist movements did not come to support the elite, but rather to support the majority. This requires the elite, or those in authority, to support its path towards development issues.”

‘Solidarity and Dignity’

This concept of empowerment was reflected in Sholkamy’s contributions to the design of Egypt’s “Takaful and Karama” (“Solidarity and Dignity”) programme, which was launched in 2015 and has benefited millions of poor Egyptians, including women, children and members of marginalized groups.

Studying the situations of women changed her ideas as an academic, she said, and made her more aware of the interconnections between the worlds of less fortunate people and the realms of government and the social elite.

Before taking her current position, Sholkamy was an assistant professor of anthropology at AUC. She has also worked at the American University of Beirut, the Arab Gulf University in Bahrain, and Yale University. She holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees from the American University in Cairo and a Ph.D. from the London School of Economics and Political Science.

Her research has included studying rural development projects in Assiut Governorate, in Upper Egypt, on which she wrote her master’s thesis, and “Socio-Economic Factors Associated with Maternal Health”, the topic of her Ph.D. dissertation, which was based on case studies of mothers in a village in Assiut Governorate.

She added that she discovered, from field experience, the lack of developmental sociology research tools at Arab universities as a theoretical and applied science. Strong social science curricula are essential in creating economic and development policies, she said.

Social Science at Arab Universities

“The biggest problem facing the study of such sciences at Arab universities is the rigidity of teaching research curricula,” Sholkamy said, “besides the lack of academic freedom, and the political restrictions on scientific research.”

According to a 2015 report by the Arab Social Science Monitor, a project of the Arab Council for the Social Sciences, fewer than half (48 percent) of Arab universities offer academic programmes in social sciences.

Sholkamy attributes a decline in studying social sciences in the Arab region to the failure of university officials and academic leaders in developing curricula and providing the required support to scholars, because of their interest in profit over other aspects that such types of highly specific studies deal with, she said.

“Social sciences and humanities, in particular, suffer from cuts in higher-education budgets because some believe they are majors that do not achieve quick profits, unlike applied colleges,” she said. “Moreover, social science disciplines are neglected in policy making. There is a gap between sociologists’ research and studies and the reality of their societies.”

Sholkamy thinks that social scientists and humanities scholars were more affected by the economic recession resulting from the Covid-19 pandemic than their colleagues in other fields. This leaves her pessimistic about opportunities for establishing advanced academic programmes in these majors in Arab universities.

Mental Health at Public Hospitals

On an issue not far from her advocacy of empowering women and vulnerable groups, Sholkamy also calls for greater integration of mental health services in Egypt’s public hospitals.

Economic conditions, the repercussions of the Covid-19 pandemic, and heavy social media use are all stressors on people’s mental health and well-being, she said.  As a result, everyone has become more vulnerable to accidents and disease, regardless of social or material background.

She added that mental health programmes for women and vulnerable populations are no longer a “luxury” but a “must,” as mental health affects their productivity and economic status.

She also calls for employing medical sociology in understanding the health needs of society. “This must be a priority for decision-makers when designing health policies,” she said.

Source: Al Fanarmedia

https://www.al-fanarmedia.org/2022/08/empowering-arab-women-goes-beyond-holding-public-positions-says-hania-sholkamy/

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URL:   https://newageislam.com/islam-women-feminism/iraqi-actress-enas-taleb-economist/d/127701

 

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