salaam! head over to Salon and check out a great article critiquing Sex in the City 2. it breaks down the derogatory and racist stereotypes that the film perpetuates and addresses the anti-Muslim sentiment of the film. take that, Carrie Bradshaw!

salaam! it is hailing in Chicago (which is actually very scary) so i have been staying safe and dry at home all day. i listened to an informative lecture called “How Capitalism Underdeveloped Africa” which i found fascinating. if you are interested in the political history of Africa, you can check it out HERE.

i found this lecture especially timely with the disasters that occurred in Haiti and Chile. subhanAllah, it is heartbreaking to see a country devastated in such a way. it is almost as horrendous, however, how the media, the United States and the capitalist system have used this devastation to their advantage. it is a phenomenon that has been coined by Naomi Klein as “The Shock Doctrine“. the basic idea behind this agenda is that the U.S. and other imperial powers take advantage of natural (and man-made) disasters by imposing and implementing free-market plans, thereby further exploiting and devastating the country. if you haven’t read her book “The Shock Doctrine” you definitely should!

i could go into this further, and maybe at a later point in time inshAllah i will. i just wanted to raise awareness about the real danger: “humanitarianism” as imperialism. am i saying that you shouldn’t give money to Haiti/donate your time to their cause? of course not. i am simply asking that you make sure you give money to LOCAL organizations (that means someone like Partners in Health instead of the Red Cross) and always be aware of the political and economic agendas that are pushing “humanitarian” campaigns.

—————————–

on a lighter note, Shukr has their new Spring items listed! they have some amazing pieces and they look comfortable and cool. it is so hard to find modest clothes that don’t make you super uncomfortable when it is 100 degrees out. here are a few of my favorites:

Salaam all! InshAllah you have had a nice weekend. It was habibi’s birthday this weekend so we went for dinner and ate way too much and now I think I need to diet for a few weeks haha.

A friend sent me this article about the politics of hijab and I found it interesting. I appreciate the time given to explain how problematic using the hijab as “women’s oppression” can be in the context of imperialism, racism, colonialism, etc. I do feel, however that there were main aspects of hijab that we not included in this article: mainly hijab as a “feminist” response to the exploitation of women and hijab as personal resistance to occupation, imperialism and Islamophobia.

The article is posted below. What do you think?

Thinly Veiled Misogyny

As French President Nicolas Sarkozy attempts to drive through a ban on the niqab and burqa, Laurie Penny describes how the Islamic veil has become yet another item of women’s clothing for men to fight over for their own ends.

The Islamic veil is the most symbolically loaded item of clothing in the world. In the nine years of war that have followed the World Trade Center attacks of 2001, the various forms of Islamic female head-covering – hijab, niqab and full-body burqa – have been condemned as oppressive, celebrated or shunned as representations of cultural difference, denounced by those who claim to defend women’s rights and defended by those who advocate religious tolerance.

The veil has been used to justify cultural conflict, to explain state attacks on civil liberties, to placate opponents of America’s war in Iraq and Afghanistan, and, just recently, as a basis for cultural persecution of French citizens by their own government.

President Nicolas Sarkozy joins a litany of male world leaders with a strong opinion on the veil. His version of a solution is to attempt to force through a partial ban on the full veil, currently worn by an estimated 1,000 French women. For Sarkozy, like many world leaders and commentators, asserting symbolic state control over the way in which women dress is more important than, for example, pursuing a comprehensive strategy to support the tens of thousands of French women from every cultural background who are victims of domestic violence.

That doesn’t matter to Sarkozy, who is more concerned with “sending a message” to “extremists” – most of whom, one suspects, will be other men. Nor did it matter to David Aaronovich, who in an article for the Guardian in 2003 expressed his confusion over how to “understand” the dress code of some Islamic women: “Take the hijab – now ubiquitous in many British cities … I really do not know what is being demanded of me. Is it saying, ‘Don’t look at me’, or ‘Look at me’?”

Aaronovich may not have considered the possibility that the hijab isn’t trying to ‘say’ anything to him at all – the possibility, upsetting to many men, that what women wear and how they behave is not necessarily to do with him. In her recent polemic One Dimensional Woman, feminist academic Dr Nina Power hypothesises that the veil, for Western men, represents an attack on the internalised ideology of misogynist capitalism. “Aaronovich’s confusion is interpretable in terms of a generalized imperative that all femininity be translatable into the logic of the market,” explains Power.

It may come as a shock, but for individual women across the world, the way in which we dress is rarely the defining quality of our human experience. The fact that our clothing choices and the ways in which we present ourselves are understood by society as the sum total of our personhood is a difficult and dispiriting reality for women today.

Anyone who has had the traumatic experience of growing up female in a culture that diminishes the personhood of women understands that the way in which they choose to dress is compromised by cultural mores, and will inevitably affect how they are judged as human beings. Context is everything, as Tehmina Kazi, the director of British Muslims for Secular Democracy (BMSD), explains:

“I do not wear hijab myself, but I respect those women who choose to do so. But of course, in places where women are forced to wear hijab or burqa, the garment is no longer liberating. Forcing women to go veiled destroys the real purpose of wearing hijab. It destroys the beauty of a woman reading the texts for herself and making an informed spiritual choice.”

For many women living in Islamic cultures, whether in Europe or in Asia, an independent, informed choice is difficult to come by. Maryam Namazie, spokesperson for the Council of Ex-Muslims of Britain, questions the assumption that all women who wear the veil outside Sharia countries do so out of choice: “Australia’s senior Islamic cleric recently compared unveiled women to ‘uncovered meat’ implying that they invite rape and sexual assault. Whilst misogynist sermons are the norm in mosques across the world … a climate of intimidation and fear makes many a woman ‘choose’ the veil even in places where veiling is not compulsory.”

For every woman wearing hijab because of personal religious conviction or comfort, there is another going veiled because of social or state pressure – and this is where feminist and liberal thought often fails to make a subtle enough case for personal freedom. In the course of writing this piece, I spoke to many white Western women who questioned the difference between women wearing the Islamic veil and women going out ‘bundled up in a hat, scarf and long coat’. The answer, of course, is that there is every difference.

For secularist activists like Namazie, the veil is more than just a piece of clothing – it has become a symbol of women’s oppression under Islam, and deserves to be treated as such: “The veil, more than anything else, symbolises the bleak reality [of life for women in strictly Islamic countries]: hidden from view, bound, gagged, mutilated, murdered, without rights, and threatened and intimidated day in and day out for transgressing Islamic mores. And this is why the veil is the first thing that Islamists impose when they have any access to power.”

British columnist Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, who is chair of BMSD, agrees, citing Rahila Gupta’s assertion that “we cannot debate the burkha or the hijab without reference to women in Iran, Afghanistan or Saudi Arabia where the wearing of it are heavily policed and any slippages are met with violence … This is a cloth that comes soaked in blood.”

The politics of symbolism are precarious, even if one’s eventual goal is liberation. Ariel Levy’s recent essay in the New Yorker decries the exchange of symbolic for systemic identity politics – a perennially tempting strategy for anyone working to enfranchise women or ethnic, cultural or sexual minorities. Feminism in particular is prey to the same confusion of the symbols and substance of oppression expressed by the French premier, which is why bra-burning – although the practice never actually occurred – has become such a tenacious image. In the same piece, Namazie advocates veil-burning as a symbolic gesture of resistance, but pro-woman activists cannot be satisfied with symbolic resistance if we want to change the world.

If a real strategy of global resistance to the oppression of women is to be built, it is profoundly anodyne to question whether the Islamic veil is a symbol of religious choice and cultural pride or an emblem of the second-class status of women in Islamist cultures. The veil is consummately both of these things, and the liberation of women across the world will not begin with veil-burning any more than the long march to freedom in the West really began with bra-burning.

In fact, the closer one looks at the extreme arguments both for and against the veil, the more one suspects that this issue isn’t really about concern for women at all. Footage recorded in 2008 of a speech by a representative of the fascist British National Party articulates this attitude perfectly. In it, the young BNP speaker expounds upon the right of average working men in Leeds to “look at women wearing low-cut tops in the street”; he declares that the right of men to objectify and consume the female body, is “part of British history – and more important than human rights”, and laments that “they” – variously, Muslims, foreigners and feminists – want to “take it away from us”.

Never mind the rights of the women in question to wear what they want or, for that matter, to walk down that Leeds street without fear of the entitled harassment made extremely explicit in this speech. This is not about women. This is about men, and how men define themselves against other men. Even Alibhai-Brown agrees that part of the problem with the veil in the West is that it has come to represent “a slur on decent Muslim men, portrayed as sexual predators who cannot look upon a woman without wanting her.”

In the dialect of male-coded cultural violence, whether it takes place on a street in Leeds, in a Middle Eastern valley, or in the minds of a generation raised on sectarian squabbling and distrust, women are valuable only and always as a cultural symbol. The furore over the veil dehumanises Islamic women, turning them into symbolic territory over which men can thrash out their cultural differences. And this is a strategy that goes right back to the playground; there are suggestions that in one school in North West England, male students from Islamic backgrounds have been bullying female Muslim pupils regarding dress codes and segregation.

Shocking as this might sound to non-Islamic sensibilities, it is just one more iteration of the everyday terrorisation of female students into following a dress-code – the pulling up of skirts, pulling down of tops and snatching away of cultural signifiers that goes on in every playground across Britain.

Competing male ideals of femininity have long been used as an ideological basis for militarism, colonialism and social control, and powerful men have long mouthed the noises of feminism to justify their militarism. George W Bush has never been a friend to the women of the world, having used his first days in office to establish his anti-abortion agenda as a condition of American aid to the world’s neediest people. Journalist Katharine Viner noted in the Guardian in 2002 that, just as President Bush used the premise of liberating the “women of cover” from their men in the days leading up to the bombing of Afghanistan, Lord Cromer, who was British consul general in Egypt from 1883 to 1907, declared that the veiling and seclusion of Islamic women was the “fatal obstacle” to the Egyptians’ “attainment of that elevation of thought and character which should accompany the introduction of Western civilisation.”

Cromer expounded on the notion that Egyptians should be “persuaded or forced” to become “civilised” by disposing of the veil. But on his return to England, the “civilising”, veil-burning Cromer saw no contradiction in founding the Men’s League for Opposing Women’s Suffrage – a group which tried by any means possible to prevent the women of Britain from gaining the right to vote.

Wars have always been fought by men over the bodies of women. Today, Islamic women in particular find themselves in the unenviable position of understanding their bodies as an ideological battleground, whether they live in Southend or Saudi Arabia. Hawkish leaders have long approached the Islamic veil as a tool in the symbolic politics of colonialism and repression; feminists and pacifists must not fall into the same trap. If we want to win the argument for the emancipation of women across the world, we need to counter the savage politics of  symbolism with a mature politics of liberation – because wherever we live and whatever we wear, women are more than pawns in a cultural war between violent, intolerant men. We are fully human beings, with battles of our own to fight for the future of humankind.

Broken Taboos in Post-Election Iran

Ziba Mir-Hosseini

December 17, 2009

(Ziba Mir-Hosseini is an independent researcher, attached to the London Middle East Institute and a regular visiting professor of global law at New York University.)

The on-camera martyrdom of Neda Agha-Soltan, the 26-year old philosophy student shot dead during the protests after the fraudulent presidential election in Iran in June, caught the imagination of the world. But the post-election crackdown has two other victims whose fates better capture the radical shift in the country’s political culture. One victim was the protester Taraneh Mousavi, detained, reportedly raped and murdered in prison, and her body burned and discarded. The other is Majid Tavakoli, the student leader arrested on December 8, after a fiery speech denouncing dictatorship during the demonstrations on National Student Day.

Following his arrest, pro-government news agencies claimed Tavakoli had been caught trying to escape dressed as a woman and published a series of photographs showing him wearing a headscarf and chador — a common version of the “modest” garb (hejab) mandated for women by the Islamic Republic. Attempts at flight in such gender-bending disguises are a classic trope in Iranian political history. The best-known instance was when the first president of the Islamic Republic, Abol-Hasan Bani-Sadr, after his deposition in 1981, allegedly fled the country in women’s dress — the Fars News Agency put a photo of him in a scarf next to that of Tavakoli. But in pre-revolutionary Iran clerics, too, such as Ayatollah Bayat, are said to have evaded the Shah’s authorities by concealing themselves beneath chadors, which pro-government media outlets now choose to ignore.

To be nabbed in this act is portrayed by the state as doubly shameful — a prisoner so afraid of punishment that he literally denies his manhood. In this case, the shame was pictured not only draped over Tavakoli’s head and shoulders but also etched on his face, unshaven, his eyes downcast. The exposure of Tavakoli’s “cowardice” was intended to humiliate a hero of the student movement, but it backfired when an Iranian photographer invited men to post pictures of themselves wearing hejab on Facebook. Men responded en masse, inside and outside Iran, asserting, “We are all Majid.”

There are many ways, indeed, in which the June presidential election, and the Green Movement that emerged in its aftermath, herald the coming of an egalitarian shift in the politics of gender and sexuality in Iran.

Rights and Honor

In 1995, I heard a recording of a lecture given by the leading religious  intellectual Abdolkarim Soroush to Daftar-e Tahkim-e Vahdat, the main student organization, on the theme of the emergence of rights-based as opposed to duty-based approaches to religion. In response to a question about the disregard for human rights in Iranian society, Soroush said something that stayed with me, to the effect that, “Until we recognize rights (haqq) as just as important as sexual honor (namus), we cannot speak of respect for human rights.”

The analogy between the defense of rights and honor is intriguing. It captures the Islamic Republic’s obsession with sexuality and the control of women, as well as the intimate link between democracy and sexuality that energizes the Green Movement.

In Iran, as in many neighboring countries, sexual honor is a core value, so deeply ingrained in the dominant culture that it is rarely questioned or even discussed except when it is attacked or infringed. Girls are brought up to understand that their honor resides in their bodies; boys are raised with one of their prime duties being to protect the honor of their sisters. These practices mean that a woman’s sexual morality is always the concern of some man: her father, brothers, husband, sons.

Before the 1979 revolution, these notions were strong throughout Iran, but the spread of education and liberal ideas had weakened them in certain sectors of society, mainly among the educated middle class in the larger cities, and particularly in affluent north Tehran. Notions of women’s right to control their own bodies were germinating, and certain liberal laws were passed that improved the gender imbalance. The 1967 Family Protection Law restricted polygamy and gave women more or less the same rights as men to divorce and child custody.

After the revolution, one of the first acts of the revolutionary council was to dismantle the Family Protection Law. The victorious Islamist “brothers” took upon themselves the duty of “protecting” — in other words, controlling — the honor of all their “sisters.” Honor became collective and the state took charge of it. The authority of the regime, in fact, came to hinge on its success in policing sexual morality. Women’s “rights” were only those granted them by the rulings of Islamic jurists, and relations between the sexes — in private as well as in public — were strictly confined by red lines set in old jurisprudential texts. An official gender policy and culture were instituted, epitomized by compulsory head covering for women, which high-ranking clerics such as Ayatollah Ahmad Azari-Qomi called the “culture of hejab.” The Islamic government instituted gender segregation in public space, criminalized sexual contact outside marriage and reduced women to sexual objects, depriving them of many legal rights they had acquired before.

This effort to turn back the clock was frustrated by the fact that after the revolution women retained the right to vote, and participated at a much higher rate in education. Not surprisingly, perhaps, over the decades since the revolution, the state’s assumption of the role of protector of women’s honor has led many men and women, particularly the young, to challenge the rhetoric and values of honor as a way of challenging the state’s denial of their individual rights. By the time of the 2009 election, many of the Islamic Republic’s sexual and moral red lines had been crossed in much of Iranian society — not just in prosperous, educated north Tehran.

The election and its aftermath suggest that rights — especially the right to vote and to have one’s vote counted — have indeed now become as important in Iranian culture as honor. Violation of this right created such fury, such a gut reaction, that huge crowds came out in the streets of many cities, with women at the forefront of the demonstrations, in open defiance of the regime’s rule of public gender segregation. Popular anger was at first focused into a single slogan: “Where is my vote?” As the protests have developed, however, they have seen a transformation in which a close link between rights and sexual honor is increasingly played upon in both the regime’s repressive actions and the Green Movement’s responses.

The Personal Is Political

Iranians of today, from both genders, all classes and all parts of the country, have rejected or at least questioned many of the gender codes and sexual taboos firmly enforced by the Islamic Republic over the past 30 years. So, at least, the current government appears to believe; hence the countrywide Social Morality Plan (tarh-e amniyat ejtema’i) instated by President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in 2006 in an attempt to reimpose the rigid codes of dress and comportment that prevailed in the earliest days of the revolution. Further evidence is provided by several novel elements in the 2009 election campaign and its aftermath.

The first element was the nature of women’s political participation. For a long time, a division, if not an antipathy, between “secular” and “religious” women has marked the politics of gender. The distinction refers to political attitudes, and not personal piety. “Religious” women, in the main, believed that the country’s laws and social norms should be based upon Islam, while “secular” women might be anti-clerical or supportive of complete separation of mosque and state. Many women of all persuasions backed the reformist President Mohammad Khatami (1997-2005), because he promised concrete improvements in women’s lives, but the divide lingered nonetheless. On the eve of the 2005 presidential election, at the end of Khatami’s second term, when secular women’s groups organized a rally in front of Tehran University to ask for equality, framing their demands in constitutional terms, women from the official reformist parties did not join them. They did not want to break all ties with the establishment and to be seen as siding with the newly emerging secular feminists, who for their part were keen to keep their distance from religious reformists.

But in April 2009, 42 women’s groups and 700 individuals, including both secular feminists and religious women from the reformist parties, came together to form a coalition called the Women’s Convergence. Without supporting any individual candidate, the coalition posed pointed questions to the field. They raised two specific demands: first, the ratification of the UN Convention on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women and second, the revision of Articles 19, 20, 21 and 115 of the Iranian constitution that enshrine gender discrimination. Using the press and new media, they put the candidates on the spot to respond.[1] Women’s demand for legal equality became a central issue in the campaign season. Distinguished filmmaker Rakhshan Bani-Etemad made a documentary, available on the Internet, which registers the voices and demands of these women and the replies of the candidates.[2] Ahmadinejad was, of course, the only candidate not to appear.

The second novelty was the appearance of Zahra Rahnavard at the side of — and even holding hands with — her husband, the candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi. Though many women politicians have served in the Islamic Republic’s legislature, they had been absent from high-level politics, and the 2009 campaign was the first time that a woman appeared as an equal partner and intellectual match for her man. Rahnavard, in fact, was the more charismatic and articulate of the couple. Her open support for women’s rights and human rights changed the tone of the campaign. She was also blunt in many of her remarks, which inspired the youth of the country. For instance, in Mousavi’s second campaign film, Rahnavard is shown in conversation with the renowned actress, Fatemeh Motamed-Arya. At one point, she observes, “A woman does not even own her own body: If you go to the hospital for an operation, you need the permission of a man.”

The third novelty, in the election aftermath, is the availability on the Internet of letters to male political prisoners — key reformist figures and people active in Mousavi’s campaign — from their wives. What makes these often very affecting love letters especially significant is that many of the writers are women from religious backgrounds who now have no qualms about speaking of their physical longing for their men, and question the very justice of the system that has imprisoned them. They are breaking another taboo, challenging the confinement of expressions of sexual desire and love to the private sphere. So the policies of the regime have generated a paradox: Having politicized the sexuality and honor of all Iranian women, previously a private matter for the family and the local community, the regime now finds its own adherents taking the policies’ spirit to an uncomfortable extreme — by making the personal political, in true feminist fashion.

The fourth, and perhaps the most important, novelty is that the regime has been caught breaking its own taboos, with the revelations of the extensive sexual abuse and rape of detainees of both sexes. Those who are demanding political rights, the government seems to be saying, have no sexual honor. The fate of Taraneh Mousavi is just one of the more egregious examples. These atrocities and the allegations of more have horrified the public — and many leading clerics. The role played by defeated reformist candidate Mehdi Karroubi in the disclosure of these sexual abuses, his support for the victims and the authorities’ refusal to allow proper investigations have added further to the rumors and led gradually to other victims breaking their silence. One of Karroubi’s witnesses, a male rape victim, refers to his decision to disclose what happened to him as “committing social suicide,” which speaks to the power of the taboo — but then, once a taboo is broken, it loses its power. On December 16, Britain’s Channel 4 TV broadcast an interview with a refugee member of the Basij, the paramilitary force charged with carrying out the arbitrary detention and abuse of protesters, movingly detailing his horror at what occurred. “I have lost my world,” he says, choking back tears. “I have lost my religion.” The clip has rapidly spread through Iranian cyberspace.[3]

The political prisoners include a number of women, ranging from Azar Mansouri, deputy head of the reformist Mosharekat Front, to human rights activists, journalists and students.[4] Some have been released, but none were among the victims of the show trials held in September, when well-known reformist personalities “confessed” on camera that there could be no cheating in the Islamic Republic and that the opposition was mistaken and misled. This government strategy had worked well in the 1980s, when “confessions” and shows of remorse by opposition leaders were regular features. But this time, far from convincing people of the integrity of the election, the show trials displayed the brutality of a regime prepared to go to any lengths to destroy former revolutionary allies who had now become reformists and leaders of the Green Movement. And this tactic, too, backfired, as messages of understanding, eulogies to the pragmatism of the political prisoners and voluntary “confessions” started to appear on the opposition-friendly websites.

Together with the Tavakoli episode, these aspects of the election aftermath have discredited the regime’s “culture of hejab” and shaken the very foundation of the government’s Social Morality Plan.

“Multiplied, Not Humiliated”

The Green Movement is not dead; in fact, it is still in its infancy, not yet fully formed. Pluralist, organic, colorful, fluid, it has moved beyond the stage of “Where is my vote?” to tackle a range of issues that animate the population, not just the restive middle-class urban youth of a thousand Western newspaper headlines, but many strata of society. The protests on National Student Day and the creative response to Tavakoli’s staged escape attempt are further evidence of the movement’s vibrancy and grassroots nature.

The campaign in support of Tavakoli has became an occasion for both solidarity and spirited debate among different elements in the Iranian opposition, as well as for condemnation of state-imposed hejab and gender discrimination, and a celebration of women’s equality and their involvement in the Green Movement.[5] “Majid Tavakoli Was Multiplied, Not Humiliated,” reads one poster. The students issued a statement referring to Tavakoli as the “honor of the students’ movement” (though the word for “honor” here, eftekhar, is neither sexual nor gendered). They stress that what matters is resistance to injustice and the struggle for freedom in Iran, a struggle that will undoubtedly continue, whether in male or female clothing. On December 15, the attorney and Nobel Peace Prize winner Shirin Ebadi welcomed the response of the “veiled men” as a blow for human rights against discriminatory laws, a move that honors both men and women, and gives feminism its true meaning.[6]

The popular response to the fraudulent June elections shows, above all, that the hardliners now in control of all centers of power in the Islamic Republic have not realized that the early revolutionary rhetoric and political chicanery that worked well enough in the 1980s have gone hopelessly stale. The more they deploy the same old tricks, the less remains of the legitimacy of the regime. The “culture of hejab” and the regime’s ability to manipulate the discourse of sexual honor have passed their sell-by date, and a “culture of rights” has taken over the popular imagination.

You can find this article HERE.

EGYPT:

Cheap Bread Frees Women to Work

Cam McGrath

CAIRO, Dec 22 (IPS) – At a small bakery in Cairo’s Boulaq district, dozens of hands thrust through a barred window waving coins and small banknotes. The clerk inside deftly takes the money and deals loaves of round flatbread into plastic bags.

“It’s busy like this all day,” he says, estimating that 20,000 loaves pass through the window bars on an average day.

Bread is an essential part of the Egyptian diet and served with nearly every meal. Access to cheap, ready-baked bread has helped liberate Egyptian women from the kitchen, allowing them to enter the workforce or spend more time with their children.

“It would be difficult to find work if I had to spend all morning baking bread,” says 51-year-old Magda El-Sayed, a widow with two children living at home. “It’s much easier to buy it on my way home from work… and it’s the only food that is still affordable these days.”

Traditionally, Egyptians baked bread in their own home. The women of the household would mix flour, water, yeast and salt, then leave the dough to rise. Fist-sized balls of dough were flattened out and left in the sun for an hour, then baked in an oven for 20 minutes.

The bread was made in large quantities and what wasn’t eaten fresh was consumed the following day.

“This is the way my great grandmother made bread, and it’ still done like this in the villages, but not in Cairo,” says sociologist Madiha El-Safty. “Very few houses in the city have those special ovens for baking bread.”

Consumption habits have changed since the 1950s due to the proliferation of bakeries, continued subsidisation, and the practicalities of modern living. Urbanised Egyptian families no longer bake bread at home. Instead, they buy it from bakeries and street vendors, sacrificing a degree of quality for convenience and cost savings.

For the 40 percent of Egyptians who live below the 2 dollars per day poverty line, the decision to buy their daily bread is largely an economic one, says El-Safty. “Because of subsidies, it costs much more for a woman to bake bread at home than to buy it.”

Subsidies on basic food items including bread were introduced in the late-1940s. Late president Anwar Al-Sadat attempted to phase them out in 1977, but quickly rescinded the order after rioting that left at least 70 dead. Successive governments have avoided confrontation, leaving bread subsidies in place at a cost of 2.5 billion dollars a year, more than the country’s annual spending on health and education.

Over 50 million Egyptians, or two-thirds of the population, eat subsidised “baladi” bread. The small round flatbread is sold at state-monitored bakeries and distributors for five piastres (less than a U.S. penny) a loaf, its price unchanged in decades. Better quality baladi bread is available at 10 piastres a loaf, while the same bread made using unsubsidised flour is available at market prices five times the cost. Poor families often buy a mix of qualities as their budget permits.

“When you have a family and eat bread with every meal the cost difference adds up,” says Amani Sarwat, a sales clerk with three children. “All prices are going up so the more cheap bread I can get the better.”

Sarwat is one of over 5.5 million women in the Egyptian workforce. Purchasing bread from bakeries frees up her time in the kitchen, allowing her to keep a part-time job and still have time for the family.

“I need the time [saved by not baking bread] to look after my children,” she says. “Besides, where would I make it?” She points out that her flat in Cairo’s Imbaba district is too small for a bread oven and the roof is cluttered with television antennas and satellite dishes.

Egyptians have traded their ovens for bakery bread, but it is an arrangement that only saves time and money provided the queues remain short. Egypt is the world’s largest importer of wheat, with shipments of seven million tonnes a year. Periodic wheat shortages and endemic corruption can result in lengthy bread lines, such as those seen in early 2008 when world grain prices skyrocketed.

“Sometimes I arrived at 5 am and there was already a queue” El-Sayed recalls. “I would wait for hours just to buy 10 or 20 small loaves, because that’s all the bakery would sell us. I had to return every morning. Sometimes the bakery said it had run out of flour, which we all knew was a lie. They are thieves. They sold the subsidised flour on the black market for huge profits.”

Bread lines are shorter now, confined mostly to mornings, says Sarwat. It takes her about 10 minutes to walk to the nearest bakery and buy bread. Her husband, a factory worker, often pitches in by picking up bread on his way home from work.

“Some days he buys it, some days I do,” she says. “Many parents send their children to buy bread if they don’t have school. It’s not just housewives there.”

Egypt boasts over 80 varieties of bread. In the countryside, where the pace of life is more relaxed, it is still possible to find families who prepare these breads at home the traditional way.

“It’s the tastiest bread in the world,” Sarwat says, reminiscing about the fluffy sun-baked “shamsi” bread that her family in southern Egypt bakes. “But for this you need lots of time.”

The article can be found HERE.

Broaching Birth Control With Afghan Mullahs

MAZAR-I-SHARIF, Afghanistan — The mullahs stared silently at the screen. They shifted in their chairs and fiddled with pencils. Koranic verses flashed above them, but the topic was something that made everybody a little uncomfortable.

“A baby should be breast-fed for at least 21 months,” said the instructor. “Milk is safe inside the breast. Dust and germs can’t get inside.”

It was a seminar on birth control, a likely subject for a nation whose fertility rate of 6 children per woman is the highest in Asia. But the audience was unusual: 10 Islamic religious leaders from this city and its suburbs, wearing turbans and sipping tea.

The message was simple. Babies are good, but not too many; wait two years before having another to give your wife’s body a chance to recover. Nothing in Islam expressly forbids birth control. But it does emphasize procreation, and mullahs, like leaders of other faiths, consider children to be blessings from God, and are usually the most determined opponents of having fewer of them.

It is an attitude that Afghanistan can no longer afford, in the view of the employees of the nonprofit group that runs the seminars, Marie Stopes International. The high birthrate places a heavy weight on a society where average per capita earnings are about $700 a year. It is also a risk to mothers. Afghanistan is second only to Sierra Leone in maternal mortality rates, which run as high as 8 percent in some areas.

“If we work hard on this issue, we can rescue our country from misery,” said Rahmatuddin Bashardost, a doctor who helps lead the mullahs’ classes.

The mullahs were reluctant participants. Truth be told, they were paid to show up. But surprisingly, they seemed to emerge from the session invigorated.

“This was a useful and friendly discussion,” said Mullah Amruddin, a tall man in a dramatic turban. “If you have too many children and you can’t control them, that’s bad for Islam.”

Maybe they were so receptive because a mullah led the class, using their own language — scripture from the Koran. Or maybe it was because some attitudes are starting to change.

Syed Wasem Massoom, 29, a mullah and one of the trainers, said urban Afghans were looking for ways to have fewer children. Afghanistan was changing, he said, especially its cities, and mullahs had better be thinking about these issues.

“People kept asking us how to have less children,” he said.

Afghan women who work for Marie Stopes, distributing birth control door to door in the country’s capital, have also noticed an interest. An overwhelming majority of people are still skeptical of their motives. (Foreign spies! Christian missionaries who want to reduce the Muslim population!) But a growing number are open to the idea.

“Sometimes they are kind of surprised that this kind of thing exists,” said one of the workers, a woman named Aziza.

In 2009 alone, the sale of birth control pills nearly doubled to 11,000 in September from 6,000 packages in January, according to Marie Stopes figures.

One woman was so happy to have birth control pills that she hugged and kissed Aziza, ripped open a package and swallowed a pill with a gulp of water.

“She said she didn’t want to wait until evening,” Aziza said, laughing at the memory. The total number of the woman’s children: 17. Three dead, 14 living.

The most difficult families are ones headed by mullahs. Aziza and her colleagues tread carefully in those households. Mahmouda, another worker, recalled walking into one such house and finding the mullah’s wife washing clothes and trying to calm a baby. She signaled silently that Mahmouda should talk in a low voice.

“ ‘If my husband finds out, he’ll punish me,’ ” Mahmouda recalled the woman saying. “ ‘I’m pregnant now. I really need those pills.’ ”

Taking birth control in secret is not unusual, the women said. Even Aziza’s own husband opposes her using it.

“He said, ‘We are Muslims and God gives us babies,’ ” she said.

She lies to him, but with a clear conscience. “I talked to him in a good way,” she explained. “I told him about the benefits, but he didn’t listen to me.”

Those who oppose it sometimes get violent. Aziza recalled people running her out of a neighborhood in Kabul after she introduced birth control there. They accused her of being on the payroll of the Americans, taking dollars to weaken the country.

“ ‘They want to capture Afghanistan,’ ” she recalled that they said. “ ‘If the Muslims are many, they won’t be able to.’ ”

In Mazar-i-Sharif, it is one mullah at a time.

Mr. Massoom, the mullah trainer, put it most directly. “This is an Islamic country,” he said. “If the clerics support this, no one will oppose it.”