Wadjda Official Trailer from Razor Film on Vimeo.

My interview with the very lovely Saudi filmmaker Haifaa Al Mansour is now out – see the full article at Aquila. I was lucky enough to meet Haifaa when she was in London promoting her debut film Wadjda about a young Saudi girl’s battle to cycle. See the trailer above. We got talking about the rise of female Middle Eastern filmmakers, the importance of personal victories, filming in Saudi and also cycling (of course!).

Here’s a snippet:

http://www.aquila-style.com/magazine/

Bediha Tunadagi of Turkey competes in the Women’s 58kg Weightlifting on Day 3 of the London 2012 Olympic Games

Wearing a modified hijab wrapped tight around her head, the female Saudi Judo fighter Wojdan Shaherkani made history in less than two minutes. In her agonisingly brief moment of glory, she became the first Saudi woman to take part in Olympics. She later told reporters there that she hoped “this was the beginning of a new era.”

Indeed, the recent London Olympics 2012 hosted the most Muslim women in the games’ entire history. It is also worth mentioning that the 2012 games hosted the first Muslim female athletes from both Qatar and Brunei as well as Saudi Arabia. With this in mind, you’d be excused for thinking that Muslim women are pretty new to the Olympics but you’d be mistaken. Muslim women have been taking part in the Olympics and winning gold for decades now.

However as Sertaç Sehlikoglu who explores Muslim women’s role in sports at the University of Cambridge explains, the recent focus on female Muslim athletes wearing the hijab means that the achievements of non-hijab wearing Muslim athletes are often neglected. And yet, it is with these non-hijab wearing Muslim athletes that the legacy of Muslim women at the Olympics begins.

“Historically, Muslim women without the hijab have been involved in international games for much longer than those who do wear some form of the hijab,” explains Sertaç Sehlikoglu. “Suat Aşeni and Halet Çambel were the first Muslim women at the Olympics and they represented Turkey at the 1936 Berlin Olympics. They were personally encouraged by Ataturk who wanted to get more women involved in public life and to create a modernised and more liberal society in Turkey. Like a lot of elite women at the time in countries such as Turkey, Egypt, Tunisia and Iran they also didn’t wear the hijab.”

Aşeni and Çambel were then followed by other non-hijab wearing Muslim athletes such as Moutawakel, Boulmerka and Shouaa who all went on to win gold medals. In 1984, Nawal El Moutawakel from Morocco became the first Muslim and Arab woman to win an Olympic gold medal. Eight years later, Hassiba Boulmerka from Algeria won a gold medal at the 1992 Barcelona Olympic Games in the 1,500 metres. Ghada Shouaa from Syria also won gold at the 1996 Atlanta Olympics and is still the only Syrian to have received a gold medal till this day.

Despite these remarkable feats of athleticism, today there is focus on (the novelty of?) hijab-wearing female athletes that overlooks this history and also side-lines serious female athletes that have chosen not to wear the hijab.

“Since 9/11 there has been an unhealthy focus on the hijab to symbolise Muslim women and that has also occurred in sport,” states Sehlikoglu from the University of Cambridge. “Particularly in the international media, there is a focus on Muslim athletes wearing the hijab and that has been to the detriment of non-hijab wearing athletes. For example, there was a disproportionate focus on the Saudi athlete [Wojdan Shaherkani] who took part this year even though she was was only a blue belt in Judo and was trained by her father.”

Sehlikoglu does however acknowledge the importance of celebrating the uniqueness of hijab-wearing Muslim athletes: “The presence of hijab-wearing women at the opening ceremony was inspiring and very influential across the Muslim world… It highlights the fact that wearing a hijab shouldn’t prevent you from taking part in sport and that you can wear the hijab and be an Olympian. However, this focus on the hijab has drawn attention away from other important achievements by female Muslim athletes that we all need to celebrate.”

One example that Sehlikoglu notes is that Turkey sent more female athletes than males to the London 2012 Olympics for the first year ever. The fact that most of the female athletes didn’t wear the hijab is one major reason, she explains, why the international media didn’t make more of this. Yet we need to recognise the importance of hijabi and non-hijabi athletes and see them for what they are – sportswomen.

The history of female Muslim athletes at the Olympics didn’t start in 2004 when Ruqaya Al Ghasara from Bahrain became the first women to wear a full hijab at the Athens Games. It began in 1936 with the participation of two young Turkish women. This focus on female Muslim athletes that are ‘recognisable’ due to the hijab distracts attention away from the wider achievements of Muslim women in sports. And all female Muslim athletes that make it to the Olympics – with or without the hijab – deserve our support and applause.

Arwa Aburawa

Arwa Aburawa is a freelance journalist based in the UK with a special interest in Muslim women, the Middle East and the environment. You can follow her on Twitter @arwa_journalist or via her website http://arwafreelance.com/

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From women in Saudi Arabic championing recycling to eco-Muslimahs using the green message to challenge perceptions about Islam, Arwa Aburawa meets the women changing the world for the better.

 Click on the image for the full article.

The UK's first birth control clinic in London

In 1926, the second birth control clinic outside of London opened its doors to women seeking free family planning advice. Located in the impoverished Greengate area of Salford, the clinic provided birth control information to working class women who weren’t able to pay for private advice from a doctor. The controversial clinic faced opposition from the Catholic Church and the medical profession but fought on and continued to offer its services to women until birth control advice was widely and freely available in the 1970s.

Unlike the suffragettes’ attention-grabbing campaigns to secure women’s rights to vote, the local-level and grinding work of women who worked to improve women’s right to birth control in the 1920s and 30s has gone somewhat unnoticed. Whilst they never marched on parliament, they worked day-in, day-out, through blitz, blackouts and at personal risk, to provide women with the knowledge to exercise control over their own bodies. For many of the women, providing birth control was an important factor for the improvements in women’s health and also the emancipation of women who had previously relied on men to limit the size of their family.

At the turn of the 19th/20th century, birth control was a very controversial issue to discuss in public although in private, many middle/upper-class women had access to such family planning information through their doctors. As such, it was working class women who couldn’t afford to pay for a private doctor who were denied birth control information and who were at the centre of the campaigns for free birth control advice. As Dr Clare Debenham, who has written a thesis entitled ‘Grassroots feminism: a study of the campaign of the Society for the Provision of Birth Control Clinics, 1924-1938′ which forms the basis of this article, points out, many middle class women felt guilty about this inequality and went on to argue that all women should enjoy control over their own bodies no matter their place in society.

Contraception as Emancipation

The birth controller saw contraception as a form of emancipation for women and the clinics therefore focused on empowering the women by giving them the information, rather than men which was the normal practice at the time. “The clinics were really into female contraception and wanted to give the control to the women rather than having to rely on the men,” explains Clare Debenham. The shocking rate of maternal death also focused women’s minds on the more sinister aspects of withholding birth control information. Between 1911 and 1930, maternal death was second only to tuberculosis as a major cause of death amongst married women, and based on the death rate it was argued giving birth was more dangerous than working in the mines.

In 1924, the Society for the Provision of Birth Control Clinics (SPBCC) was established to campaign for municipal birth control clinics that were free and easily accessible to working class women. In the mean time, voluntary clinics were set up across the country to bridge the gap until their goals were realised. Although the SPBCC and many birth controllers have been overshadowed in the history books by the flamboyant Marie Stopes of Married Love fame, the society was able to set up clinics across the country and provide women with birth control advice.

The SPBCC was also more autonomous and a lot less autocratic and confrontational when compared with Marie Stopes’ clinics. “A lot of the women involved in the birth control clinics, unlike say Marie Stopes, just worked hard with little drama. There was no dramatics,” says Debenham. “If someone had got thrown into jail than maybe we’d know more about it but it was all very low key.”

Manchester & Salford Mothers’ Clinic Opens in 1926

In 1926, the Manchester & Salford Mother Clinic located in Greengate opened and was run by Mary Stocks, Charis Frankenburg and Flora Blumberg. Mary Stocks was a Fabian who saw birth control as strongly linked to a women’s right to self-determination and she also campaigned for the removal of the marriage bar for female teachers in Manchester. Charis Frankenburg, a former midwife, was a Jewish Conservative whose respectable family ran a factory in the area. Flora Blumberg was also a Conservative, which was unusual as most of the support for birth control came from Labour supporters. Even so, motherhood was an inevitable aspect of many women’s experiences at the time so it was an important issue which united many women across political and class divisions.

As Debenham points out, “It was quite odd that there was such Conservative support as most of the people at the clinics would have been Labour supporters but there was a lot of diverse people involved in the birth control issue. I mean Mary Stocks was a Liberal, Charis Frankenburg was a Conservative and the receptionist at the clinic was a Communist! Of course there were occasions when people disagreed but on the local level there really was a cross-section of people involved.”

The clinic was ideally located above a pie-shop which provided an ideal cover for women who wanted to be discreet about their visit to the centre. The clinic was part of the Society for the Promotion of Birth Control and was rather successful – Charis Frankenburg calculated that in their first eight years they had seen over three thousand two hundred patients. In fact, gynaecologist Sir John Peel calculated that by the end of 1927 nine SPBCC birth control clinics had collectively seen 23,000 patients.

Local feminist councillors such as Shena Simon (Liberal) and Cllr Annie Lee (Labour) supported the clinic and there was significant support from the Women’s Co-op Guild, which was made up of a lot of working class women. For example, Mrs Hescott who was the secretary of the Manchester branch of the Women’s Co-op Guild was also a founding member of the clinic. In fact, the WCG overwhelmingly passed a resolution during the 1923 Annual Congress supporting the dissemination of birth control information, making it the first women’s organisation and the first working class organisation to formally support birth control.

“Cursed, Distrusted and Despised”

The clinic in Salford did, however, attract some opposition. As Clare Debenham has written, according to Mary Stocks, the birth controllers were “cursed by the Roman Catholic Church, distrusted by the Church of England and ignored by the medical profession.” In Salford, the clinic faced opposition from the local Catholic church which saw the clinic as a direct challenge to its authority. Dr Henshaw who was enthroned as Bishop in 1925 was quick to denounce the clinic and its methods in the Catholic press: “Horrible things, strange filthy things… The powers of evil have refined their methods and unsavoury subjects are clothed with scientific names… one of these centres had been opened up not far from the Cathedral.” (Article reproduced in the Manchester Guardian (22.3.1926) from the Catholic Federalist cited in Debenham, 2010, p125).

The following month Henshaw was quoted using equally colourful language about the clinic’s methods: ‘Birth control, an abomination in Catholic eyes is infinitely worse than the unnatural vices of Sodom and Gomorrah. Filthy knowledge is not less filthy because it is imparted in a “clinic”, or “centre” (Evening Chronicle (10.4.1926) cited in Debenham, 2010, p125).’

Furthermore, despite the initial support of the Women’s Guild after 1923, “the Guild leadership took no significant initiative on family endowment, birth control, or any other issues of concern to working class women that did not have prior approval of the Labour Party.” (cited in Debenham, 2010, p170). Some feminists were also opposed the birth control campaigns which they saw as a distraction to their cause and felt that talk about such matter involving sexual relations was not respectable.

The backing from the Labour party which the movement had expected or thought it would get also didn’t materialise. “Because it was a controversial topic, many regarded it as a vote loser and so didn’t they didn’t really give it any public support,” explains Debenham. “A lot of the Labour MPs relied on Catholic voters and so they were worried that showing support for birth control would lose them the Catholic vote.”

Legislation and the Future of Birth Control

Legislation was passed in 1930 in the form of a memorandum 153/MCW which allowed birth control advice to be transmitted to women via municipal clinics on the grounds of health. However, the birth controllers quickly realised that this memorandum was quite restrictive (and wasn’t mandatory) and so many continued to keep open their practices to serve women who were not accounted for under the new legislation.

Very few local authorities were willing to take on board the new legislation and by 1931, only 36 authorities had taken advantage of the provisions of the Memorandum. As Debenham states: “If the municipal clinics in 1930 were made compulsory than it would haven been job done for the birth controllers but the fact was that there were only voluntary and a lot of councils didn’t do a single thing to improve birth control after the bill was passed.”

By 1939, only 84 local authorities had taken any action to establish municipal birth control clinics – in other words, two thirds of all local authorities had taken no action at all. In contrast by 1939, the number of voluntary clinics had grown to 66 and so to some extent they were making up for the lack of progress by the local authorities. For example, the success of the Salford clinic meant that in 1933 it had to move to larger premises in Manchester. “I initially thought that after the legislation was passed that it would be the end of the birth control clinic but in fact many carried on and it wasn’t really until 1972 that the work of the clinics was taken on by the department. So until that time it was up to the voluntary sector to provide the service to the women…” remarked Debenham.

It took a long time for attitudes towards contraception and birth control to move on from connotations of being associated with dirty magazines to something which all couples had to deal with and it wasn’t until 1972 that birth control provision became part of the NHS. The early birth control clinics of 1920s and 1930 no doubt played an important role in making birth control more respectable and also bringing the debate into the public sphere. As Debenham declares, “It was local action empowering local people – what the women working in those early birth control clinics did really does deserve a lot more recognition.”

Article by Arwa Aburawa

The original article was published at Manchester’s Radical History.

:: Image via Wellcome Library

On the November 1st 1933 Ellen Tooley made history by becoming the first woman councillor in Eccles. Although she wasn’t particularly fond of her new title as the first woman councillor in Eccles, she lived with it all her life and it no doubt it helped inspire many other women to play an active role in local politics.

Women in Eccles had been trying to get elected to the Eccles Town Hall without any success since 1919, yet in 1933 the town voted in two women councillors. Ellen Tooley was first to be announced as the winning candidate for the seat of Winton; literally minutes later, Mary Higgins was elected as the councillor for Barton. Veronica Trick, the granddaughter of Ellen Tooley, describes the night in an article titled The Power to get Things Changed! Ellen Tooley, Eccles’ First Woman Councillor….

Read the full piece here at Manchester’s Radical History.

This March 2011, they completed their six month training and returned to Jordan to start a new life for their village. Hopefully, they willl manage to attract enough attention for a sponser to pay for the start-up costs for the solar panels- if only so that they get a chance to put their skills into practice and bring solar power to their villages in the harsh deserts of Jordan. Here’s the piece I wrote about them for Green Prophet….

For many living in the harsh and desolate deserts of south Jordan, life without electricity is the norm. Either the infrastructure which provides electricity doesn’t reach them or they simply don’t have the money to afford it. However, all that looks set to change as two women bring to light the advantages of solar energy.

Two Jordanian Bedouin women have recently returned from a six-month course at a unique college in India where they were trained as solar engineers. The two women, who are illiterate and have never been employed, were carefully selected by the elders in the village to attend the course at Barefoot college in India which helps poor rural communities become more sustainable.

“We’ve been taught about solar energy and solar panels and how to generate light,” explains Rafi’a Abdul Hamid, a mother of four who lives in a tent in the deserts of south Jordan. “Hopefully when we return we will be able to teach others and use everything we’ve learnt here in India to improve our village.”

Building Sustainable Bedouin Communities

Many of the Bedouin communities in Jordan which previously lived off their herds, are now highly dependent on government handouts. They usually make up the poorest sector of society and have a very low standard of living. As such the government sees this project as a strategic way to encourage these poor villages to generate their own energy and also become more self-sufficient.

Raouf Dabbas, the senior advisor to the Ministry of Environment in Jordan told Green Prophet: “Providing this green technology to the rural community, whilst it will not have a major impact on reducing climate change, it will have a profound impact on the socio-economic position of the bedouins and it will help improve their standard of living.”

Read the full article which was published at Green Prophet.

Image via EDgAr H

By Arwa Aburawa

Despite the recent barrage of news on the ridiculous niqab/hijab/burqa bans restricting women’s entry into education, it turns out that Muslim women are some of the best educated women in the world. Even in the most unlikely place of Saudi Arabia, Muslim women are graduating and becoming some of the most accomplished and successful scientists in the world.

According to the latest report by UNESCO, women in Saudi Arabia now outnumber western women in worldwide university enrollment and graduation rates. Furthermore, 13 Muslim countries produce a higher percentage of women science graduates than the US and upto40% of Saudi doctors are women.  And it’s not only students and doctors that are pushing the boundaries, notables promoting science to women include Sheikha Mozah of Qatar and Princess Sumaya of Jordan. The science revolution of the Islamic world is here, and clearly it’s being led by women.

I spoke to Samira Islam – the first Saudi woman to complete a basic education, gain a PhD and be short listed for the L’Oreal/UNESCO ‘Women in Science’ award – about the role she played in transforming Saudi Arabia’s education system for women.

Speaking to me from her apartment in Cairo overlooking the Nile River, Samira admits that when she was growing up in the late 1950’s things were very different. “There was very little schooling and the education system for girls was primitive in Saudi Arabia,” explains Samira. “People would send their daughters to a woman’s house to just learn the Qur’an and that was the maximum that was on offer.”

Samira’s parents, however, and in particular her father were keen that she get a good education and paid the teachers from the local school, which was strictly for boys, to teach her. After her secondary education, Samira’s father realized that there were little facilities for his daughter in Saudi and so sent her to Egypt to finish her studies. She went onto to earn her degree and PhD in pharmacology.

“It was big news in my country and people interviewed my father,” she recalls. “There was one newspaper who interviewed him, it was the last interview before he died, and the last question they asked him was to describe what he felt about his daughter being the first woman in Saudi to receive a PhD and he said ‘Now, I can accept death with pleasure.’” A couple of months later Samira’s father passed away and she decided to return to Saudi.

She soon found work at the King Abdul Al-Aziz University which had a branch for girls to study although they weren’t allowed to enroll as official students. “I held talks and lectures but they had to be after Maghrib when it got dark and in a different building so that the girls weren’t seen going into the university.” Professor Samira was unhappy with this and decided to try and open an official department for girls.

However, many feared a backlash, as there had been when the first girl’s primary school opened in 1950. The head of King Abdul Al-Aziz University told Samira that fanatics would kill her but she replied that all she wanted was one chance. “There were some fanatics, I hate to use the word Islamists and ruin the image of Islam because of some opportunists, who were against the school. They went to King Faisal and told him that they would never let their girls go to the school. He said ‘Even if the school is in the dessert whoever wants to go can go and if you don’t want to go than don’t go!’”

A year later in 1974, the girls were allowed to enroll as formal students and were taught medicine and science. “Things moved fast and people seemed to accept the changes,” admits Samira. “I was respected by the other lecturers who took me seriously and weren’t wanting to see themselves as superior.”

In the first year alone, forty girls enrolled for science and sixty others for medicine and since then women’s education progressed. As the UNESCO report shows, women are enrolling in science degrees in numbers to rival the west and in Saudi Arabia now women make up 58% of the student population.

“I don’t know if it was because of my time in Egypt but I wanted to see change even if it was slowly and a lot really has changed. We now have several Muslim women who are proving that they are smart and capable scientists.”

Link to original article on elan site.

by Arwa Aburawa

Not too long ago, if anybody wrote about Muslim women in the down-and-depressed, stereotypical manner then it would be left to some sensitive Muslim man to reply. Or more than likely, it would just be left. All that is changing due to a new generation of media-savvy Muslim women who are fighting back with articles, blogs and witty comebacks quicker than you

Asma Uddin of AltMuslimah

can say “oppressed housewife.”

“I think the hijab debate in France back in 2003 made us all realize that stereotypes we thought we had dealt with were still there,” explains Rajnaara Akhtar of Pro-Hijab, a UK-based campaign group which defends the right to wear the hijab. “Certainly in France, the view still seemed to be that Muslim women were oppressed and waiting to be rescued. We could not sit back in silence any longer and decided to engage in the debate.”

Rajnaara acknowledged that part of the problem was that until recently, Muslim women have been particularly reluctant to talk to the press. Fear and mistrust of the media meant the many were holding back and were consequently represented by Muslim men- something which proved rather counter productive. “I mean you can’t say ‘look at how free these women are’ but it’s a man saying it! It was high time that we used our knowledge and skills to represent ourselves.”

On a more global scale, the rise of the internet has meant that many Muslim women can now setup a blog or website and speak their mind without fear that their words are going to be misrepresented. News sites tackling inaccurate portrayals of Muslim women such as Muslimah Media Watch (MMW) and Altmuslimah are going from strength to strength. MMW which started life as a one woman blog in 2007 was recently re-launched as a website with a 21 plus blogging team hailing from places as far afield as Egypt to Switzerland.

Fatemeh Fakhraie of Muslimah Media Watch

Fatemeh Fakhraie, the US writer and founder of MMW, remarks that she was uncomfortable with the mainstream media’s tendency to portray Muslim women as either “exotic sex slave, oppressed woman, or dangerous terrorist” and so decided to setup the blog. MMW states that it tackles “one-dimensional and misleading” representations of Muslim women in everything from small-town newspapers and blogs to major news channels and women’s magazines-for example MMW questioned the consistently negative portrayal of Muslim women in Marie Claire.

Whilst this media intervention is certainly novel, it by no means reflects a sudden awakening amongst Muslim women. As Fatemeh explains, “Muslim women have been thinking and writing and participating since the beginning of Islam but I don’t think anyone’s been listening until now… I do think there’s been a wonderful influx of differing Muslim women voices in the last ten years in response to 9/11 and the fact that, as Muslims, we have been forced into a spotlight.”

This “spotlight” may also explain the success of these sites and organisations which, Asma Uddin of Altmuslimah insists, are taking issues that were previously restricted to academic circles and the masses and Muslim women are dealing with them in their daily lives.

The increasingly vocal reactions also reflect a new generation of Muslim women who are well-educated, smart and unafraid to question what they read in the news. As Asma explains, “As second generation American Muslim women we are a lot more concerned with civic engagement and dealing with the media than our parents, who were busy trying to make a living. We have more ownership and confidence to express ourselves.”

Rajnaara Akhtar presenting an award

Rajnaara, who lives in the UK echoed this sentiment stating that Muslim women identify themselves as British Muslims and are secure enough in their identity to stand up for what they believe.  “We feel part of this society, we see ourselves as British… We don’t feel apologetic for our particular religious affiliations, so hopefully our positive engagement and responses will make it much harder for people to depict Muslim women in a stereotypical manner in future.”

Here’s part 1: Muslim women in Science

Professor Samira Islam is clearly a busy woman. The first women in Saudi to complete her primary, secondary education, to graduate with a degree, a PhD and become a professor, she also heads the Drugs Monitoring Unit and was shortlisted for the L’Oreal/UNESCO “Women in Science Award” in 2000. In May 2009 she was awarded the “Makkah Award for Excellency” the highest distinction ever awarded to Saudi citizen for exemplary contribution to Science & Research.

I have been chasing her for about two months for an interview on Muslim women in Science and I was worried I was starting to look a little stalkerish. Actually, a little stalkerish is probably an understatement as I have left her emails on every email account I could find, I’ve rang her on every number I track down and I’ve added her on Skype, Linkedin, Facebook… I think you get the picture. But when I finally get to speak to her she is so worth the trouble.

“I am so sorry, my dear” she says with an odd Egyptian twang considering she’s from Saudi Arabia. “I have just been so busy and I recently received the bad news that my brother passed away suddenly.” Damn, now I feel like an insensitive creep. She then goes on to explain that she’s actually about to head off as she needs to catch a plane to Cairo in two hours time. She gives me all her details and says to ring in the next day or two. Well that doesn’t tell me much but it does explain the slight Egyptian accent…