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
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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
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