Taliban Stop Men and Women from Dining Out and Visiting Parks Together
New
Age Islam News Bureau
13
May 2022
• Women
Participate In Saudi Census 2022 as Field Researchers for First Time
• Afghan
Women in UK at Risk of Domestic Violence: Rights Charity
• Shireen
Abu Akleh Remembered as One of Arab World’s Leading Journalists
• Int’l
Women’s Group Holds Italian Cultural Event ‘The Great Beauty’
• UAE:
A Fire Doesn’t Distinguish Between Man or Woman, Female Emirati Firefighter
Says
Compiled
by New Age Islam News Bureau
URL: https://newageislam.com/islam-women-feminism/taliban-women-dining-parks/d/126998
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Taliban
Stop Men and Women from Dining Out and Visiting Parks Together
(representative image). Photograph :( Reuters)
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May
12, 2022
HERAT:
Taliban authorities have banned men and women from dining out together and
visiting parks at the same time in the western Afghan city of Herat, an
official said today.
Afghanistan
is a deeply conservative and patriarchal nation but it is common to see men and
women eating together at restaurants – particularly in Herat, a city
long-considered liberal by Afghan standards.
Since
their return to power in August the Taliban have increasingly imposed
restrictions segregating men and women in line with their austere vision of
Islam.
Riazullah
Seerat, a Taliban official at the promotion of virtue and prevention of vice
ministry in Herat, said authorities “have instructed that men and women be
segregated in restaurants”.
He
told AFP that owners had been verbally warned that the rule applies “even if
they are husband and wife”.
One
Afghan woman who did not wish to be identified said the manager told her and
her husband to sit separately at a Herat restaurant yesterday.
Safiullah
– a restaurant manager who like many Afghans goes by only one name – confirmed
he had received the ministry diktat.
“We
have to follow the order, but it has a very negative impact on our business,”
Safiullah said, adding that if the ban continues he will be forced to fire
staff.
Seerat
also said his office has issued a decree that Herat’s public parks should be
segregated by gender, with men and women permitted to visit only on different
days.
“We
have told women to visit parks on Thursday, Friday and Saturday,” he said.
“The
other days are kept for men who can visit for leisure and for exercise.”
Women
wanting to exercise on those days should find a “safe place or do it in their
homes”, he added.
The
Taliban previously promised a softer rule than their first stint in power from
1996 to 2001, which was marked by human rights abuses.
But
they have increasingly restricted the rights of Afghans, particularly girls and
women, who have been prevented from returning to secondary schools and many
government jobs.
In
Herat authorities have ordered driving instructors to stop issuing licences to
female motorists.
Women
across the country have been banned from travelling alone, and last week the
authorities ordered them to cover fully in public, ideally with a burqa.
Source:
Free Malaysia Today
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Women
Participate In Saudi Census 2022 as Field Researchers for First Time
Photo:
Saudi Gazette
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May
12, 2022
JAZAN
— For the first time ever, the General Authority for Statistics (GASTAT) has
made it possible for women to work as field researchers within the Saudi Census
2022 program.
According
to Sabq news portal, several women candidates to work as field researchers have
started the training program for the Saudi Census Project, which lasts four
days, at the Prince Sultan Cultural Center theater in Jazan city.
The
supervisor of the Saudi census in the Jazan region, Ali al-Hamdi, said
empowering women in this session comes as their first ever participation since
the launch of the Saudi census.
He indicated
that the women have undergone a training program that helps raise their skills
in the population enumeration process, in terms of how to use the national
address, as well as ensuring data quality and the potential cases during the
actual population enumeration process, in addition to the method of dividing
and assigning researchers' areas.
GASTAT
has confirmed that the outputs of the Saudi Census 2022 from detailed
statistical data will be a basis and a reference for decision-makers in urban
planning, as it will contribute and help greatly in the development of public
services, such as transportation, education, housing, health care and many
others.
The
census outputs are used by decision-makers in government agencies through the
census data in order to develop several fields, GASTAT said.
It
said the most prominent fields that are being developed are: the policies
related to work, training, housing and investment; public services and
development programs; developing urban plans for cities, as well as
distributing budgets between administrative regions as much as needed.
Source:
Saudi Gazette
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Afghan
women in UK at risk of domestic violence: Rights charity
May
12, 2022
LONDON:
Female Afghan evacuees to the UK are facing heightened risks of domestic
violence due to Home Office failures to find permanent accommodation for
refugees eight months after Britain’s exit from Afghanistan, a rights charity
said on Thursday.
Human
Rights Watch has urged the Home Office to step up efforts to house refugees,
with 12,000 of the 18,000 evacuated from Afghanistan still in temporary
accommodation.
Assistant
women’s rights researcher at HRW, Sahar Fetrat, said of five women interviewed
by the charity, all, while grateful for being evacuated, were facing increased
domestic violence, surveillance, and constraints on their movement while they
remained in temporary housing.
“They
dealt with a huge amount of trauma before and during their flight and are now
dealing with conditions affecting their mental health and keeping them from
integrating.
“The
women I spoke with are resilient and eager to move ahead in beginning new lives
in the UK, but they feel stuck right now, in environments that are often
dangerous for women. They need more support from the UK government to rebuild
their and their families’ lives,” Fetrat added.
Having
written to the home secretary, minister for refugees, and other relevant UK
authorities in April to raise these concerns, HRW said it was still waiting on
a response.
The
women said that the lack of personal space in temporary accommodation had
increased levels of distress, while pressure from the evacuated community
members had “intimidated” those women facing domestic violence from reporting
it.
HRW
reported that one woman said: “A woman was battered by her husband in our
hotel. When she tried to report it, the community in the hotel stopped her by
intimidating her over the consequences.”
Another
woman said: “Several times, I have heard a couple fighting next door. The
husband shouts and leaves, slamming the door, and the wife cries loudly. She
has spent seven months in a hotel room and hasn’t seen anything but the hotel
premises.”
The
women said traditional gender roles meant some of the women would have faced
limited freedom in Afghanistan, but the strains would be offset by the privacy
of their own space.
Women
from less traditional backgrounds were facing microaggressions and sexist
comments from some men, with one woman describing having returned from a run to
be confronted by a man who said, “I see you have integrated too soon, haven’t
you?”
Young,
single women were reportedly receiving harsher judgements, with the environment
being described as “getting more toxic and intolerable day by day.”
Four
of the women interviewed said they had been evacuated because they had worked
outside the home, in some cases in prominent jobs, with the fifth woman
evacuated due to her husband’s role in the previous Afghan government.
One
of the women said: “The sense of constantly being watched for every action I
take, everywhere I go, getting judged for not wearing a hijab, is restricting
me. It is tiresome.”
HRW
said the government must take the needs and preference of women into account,
with special attention to concerns that single women or women-headed households
may face, as it addresses the worsening refugee crisis.
“The
government should have clear and effective policies to deal with domestic
violence in temporary housing, including posted and outreach materials in
Afghan languages.
“Staff
in these facilities should be trained to recognize and respond to gender-based
violence, should be made aware of and sensitive to the residents’ diverse
backgrounds, and should treat all residents with respect,” it added.
Source:
Arab News
https://www.arabnews.com/node/2080681/world
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Shireen
Abu Akleh remembered as one of Arab world’s leading journalists
11
May 2022
Shireen
Abu Akleh, killed Wednesday while covering clashes in the West Bank between the
Israeli army and Palestinian gunmen, was a veteran journalist and among Arab
media’s most prominent figures.
Abu
Akleh, 51, was born in Jerusalem. Carrying both a Jerusalem residency card and
an American passport, she began working for Al Jazeera in 1997 and regularly
reported on camera from across Israel, the West Bank and Gaza.
Her
position as an Al Jazeera Arabic correspondent in Jerusalem made her a
household name and a familiar face for tens of millions of viewers around the
Arab world.
“I
chose to become a journalist to be close to people. It may not be easy to
change reality, but I was at least able to bring their voice to the world,” Abu
Akleh said in a video taped for the Qatari channel’s 25th anniversary.
She
was born in East Jerusalem to a Palestinian Christian family. Her mother was
born in West Jerusalem, before the creation of Israel in 1948, and her father
was from Bethlehem, in the West Bank.
In
an interview shortly before her death, Abu Akleh, who was also a US citizen,
described herself as a “product of Jerusalem,” with the Israeli-Palestinian
conflict shaping much of her life.
She
attended secondary school in East Jerusalem’s Beit Hanina, then matriculated at
the Jordan University of Science and Technology to study architecture. She
later transferred to Yarmouk University in Jordan from which she graduated with
a bachelor’s degree in print journalism.
Abu
Akleh graduated from university the year the Oslo peace accords were signed and
then joined the nascent Voice of Palestine radio, before switching to Al
Jazeera in 1997, just a year after the network launched, and went on to become
an iconic personality in Arab media.
Her
prominence grew through her coverage of the Second Intifada from 2000 to 2005,
as well as Israeli politics. She also covered five conflicts between Israel and
Gaza and the Lebanon war in 2006.
In
a sign of her importance to Palestinian audiences, flowers were placed on the
side of the road by West Bank residents as the vehicle carrying her body moved
towards Nablus, where an autopsy was scheduled before her burial in Jerusalem.
Her
name trended across Twitter in Arabic on Wednesday, setting social media alight
with support for the Palestinians, and her image was projected over the main
square in the West Bank city of Ramallah as mourners flooded the Al Jazeera
offices there and her family home in East Jerusalem.
In
the hours after her death, young Palestinians described Abu Akleh as an
inspiration, especially to women.
“She
never tired,” Al Jazeera senior international correspondent Hoda Abdel-Hamid
told AFP by phone from Ukraine. “She was always there whenever anything
happened.”
Senior
Al Jazeera journalist Dima Khatib tweeted that Abu Akleh was “one of the first
Arab women war correspondents in the late 1990s when the traditional role of
women was to present from the television studio.”
“Shireen
was a pioneer in a generation that broke stereotypical gender roles in TV
journalism,” Khatib said.
In
a recent interview, Abu Akleh said she was often afraid while reporting but
made sure to avoid unnecessary risk.
“I
don’t throw myself at death,” she told an outlet in the West Bank city of
Nablus. “I search for a safe place to stand and how to protect my crew before
worrying about the footage.”
Abu
Akleh had US citizenship and often visited America during the summer months,
but lived in East Jerusalem and the West Bank, and her exact relationship to
the US was not immediately clear. She leaves behind a brother and her parents.
Last
year, Abu Akleh wrote in the publication This Week in Palestine that Jenin, the
place where she died, was not just “one ephemeral story in my career or even in
my personal life.”
“It
is the city that can raise my morale and help me fly. It embodies the
Palestinian spirit that sometimes trembles and falls but, beyond all
expectations, rises to pursue its flights and dreams,” she said.
Abu
Akleh was shot in the head during a firefight between Israeli troops and
Palestinian gunmen in the restive West Bank city. The Palestinians have blamed
Israel for the killing, and Israeli officials have said Palestinian gunmen may
have fired the fatal shot.
It
had started as another routine assignment for Abu Akleh. She’d emailed
colleagues that she was heading to the Jenin refugee camp to check on reports
of an Israeli military raid.
“I
will bring you the news as soon as the picture becomes clear,” she wrote.
Source:
Times Of Israel
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Int’l
Women’s Group holds Italian cultural event ‘The Great Beauty’
KUWAIT
CITY, May 12: The International Women’s Group in Kuwait held an Italian
Cultural Event on Sunday, May 8, under the title “The Great Beauty”, in the
presence of a number of distinguished guests.
The
program was organised in cooperation with the Embassy of Italy and inaugurated
by the IWG President, Mrs. Cristiana Baldocci, spouse of the Italian Ambassador
to the State of Kuwait. She welcomed the attendees thanking Sheikha Hanouf
Bader Al Muhamad Al Sabah, Honorary President of the International Women’s
Group and spouse to H.E the Minister of Foreign Affairs, for her constant
support. Ms Baldocci explained the special meaning of “The Great Beauty”. Taken
from an Italian Oscar-awarded movie, the title is expressing a common
characteristic of the Italian culture and lifestyle as a “constant search of
Beauty”.
Ms.
Baldocci opening was followed by a welcome address by H.E. Carlo Baldocci
Ambassador of Italy to Kuwait. The Ambassador expressed his happiness for
participating and contributing in the celebration, congratulating the
International Women Group for their work. He highlighted that the cultural
itinerary presented across Italy is a relevant and distinguished element of the
friendship between Italy and Kuwait. He also underlined the role played by
Italy as cultural super power. H.E. Carlo Baldocci concluded his speech by thanking
the attendees and welcoming their visit to Italy.
The
ceremony included a screening of a documentary film highlighting the
magnificence of Italy though design, tourism, fashion and food such as: Italian
luxury design; fashion shows; touristic jewel to be discovered by International
tourism; attractions and Extra Virgin Olive Oil presentation and tasting and
much more.
The
ceremony then concluded by the “La Nottedella Taranta” band playing
folkloristic and typical music from the South of Italy At the end of the
ceremony, raffle prizes were distributed among the guests. As well as door
gifts for all participants including special handcraft ceramic pieces from
Umbria Region, Extra Virgin Olive samples and “An Italian Food Journey” the
book especially published by the Embassy of Italy to Kuwait.
The
buffet offered was a triumph of Italian specialities from several Italian
Regions with a street food approach including Bruschetta station, pasta
station, Cannoli station, Nutella station and the fabulous Italian Ice-cream.
Sponsors of the event: Kuwait Airways; Acqua dell’ Elba, Dr.Vranjes, Eataly,
Cioccolatiitaliani and Cipriani.
Source:
Arab Times Online
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UAE:
A fire doesn’t distinguish between man or woman, female Emirati firefighter
says
May
13, 2022
Aghaddir
Ali
Ajman:
Wijdan Ali Abdullah Al Mazimi,23, an Emirati woman firefighter, who works for
Ajman Civil Defence, feels that it takes a great deal of self-confidence and
determination to break social taboos and be part of a profession that has
traditionally been a male domain.
Al
Mazimi had joined the force in 2018 as part of the first 15 woman firefighters
in the UAE and since then, ‘Protection, Rescue, Sacrifice’ have been her motto.
Speaking
exclusively to Gulf News, Al Mazimi said: “We want to break the barrier that
keeps women from working in unorthodox professions. When there’s a fire, it
doesn’t distinguish between a man or a woman. Firefighters are required to work
as a team to salvage a situation. When I am rescuing a victim, saving a life is
my priority and nothing else matters.”
For
15 brave Emirati women who have joined the country’s first Women’s Firefighting
Unit at Ajman Civil Defence, the opportunity was too good to let go. Ajman
Civil Defence welcomed their first batch of female firefighters in 47 years who
took on a role that was usually reserved for men. This group of female
firefighters is believed to be the first such group, not only in the UAE, but
in the entire Middle East as well.
Ajman
Civil Defence says it is excited to have these women firefighters on board and
they are being provided with all necessary training and skill-development
opportunities on the job.
Al
Mazimi went through an intensive training course, along with her 14 colleagues.
Their training regimen included military training and specific training on
job-related issues, before they were commissioned into service.
Al
Mazimi thanked Lt-General Shaikh Saif Bin Zayed Al Nahyan, Deputy Prime
Minister and Minister of Interior, for giving them the opportunity to join the
Civil Defence workforce. She also profusely thanked her male colleagues for
helping her hone her skills as a firefighter.
Following
are excerpts from a free-wheeling chat.
GULF
NEWS: How was the experience as the only female member at the state level in a
Civil Defence job — especially as a firefighter?
WIJDAN
ALI ABDULLAH AL MAZIMI: Working in firefighting is a very unique and
interesting experience for a woman. It is tiring and exhausting, but I managed
to develop a lot of skills within a short span of time. The job is full of
challenges, but we have been able to prove to the world that Emirati women are
capable of working in unorthodox roles. The challenges we face on the job
encourage and motivate us to do more for the community.
What
challenges and difficulties do you face?
At
the beginning, it was difficult to adapt to working in closed spaces, with
oxygen in short supply and enduring high temperatures during training. Storming
into confined and narrow spaces and staying there for long periods of time were
really tough. Moreover, we are required to carry fire and rescue equipment and
other survival kit — from life jackets to oxygen cylinders — that were very
heavy. But we are proud that we succeeded in overcoming all those obstacles and
today, thanks to our rigorous training, we have achieved great fitness levels,
skills and self-confidence.
Over
and above the occupational hazards, we also had to battle against the odds in
terms of a section of the society’s reservations about women working as
firefighters. It is one profession that has always been known to be a male
domain. But thank God and thanks to our wise leadership and the care of our
officials who accepted us in this unusual role and considered us as competent
enough to make the seemingly impossible possible!
What
kind of difficulties do you have to face during a firefighting operation?
Among
the most crucial difficulties that we face during a fire-rescue operation is
evacuation of people trapped in the fire. Again, time is of the essence in all
such life-saving operations. Teamwork, cooperation and integration play a very
important role in any firefighting or rescue operation.
How
many firefighting operations have you been involved in so far?
During
the past four years, I have been involved in hundreds of firefighting and
rescue operations.
Will
you, at any point in you career, consider leaving this occupation and opting
for something less hazardous?
I
never want to leave this profession. I have ambitions and I want to develop
myself as a successful firefighter.
Have
you succeeded in maintaining a balance between your career and your commitments
as a homemaker?
Yes,
I have managed to maintain that fine balance between work and home in the best
way I can. Family members have a big role to play if women are to be successful
in their careers. Family members ought to cooperate with a working woman and
always help her maintain that fine work-life balance. A husband is one of the
most important parties in this equation.
Tell
us about any emergency situation that you had to handle at work and how did you
cope with it?
I
dealt with a fire accident in an apartment, where a two-year-old boy was
stranded alone in the apartment. He was playing on his iPad, when the fire
broke out and all the family members rushed out of the apartment, leaving the
child inside. I took the boy out and handed him over safely to his mother, who
was still in a state of shock. It was a horrific moment.
Source:
Gulf News
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URL: https://newageislam.com/islam-women-feminism/taliban-women-dining-parks/d/126998