I’m notorious for hyperbole, so it probably carries little water for me to say that Mona Eltahawy was perhaps the most energized, passionate, and inspiring speaker I’ve ever seen. Therefore, with the bare minimum of water carried, the Egyptian-born award-winning journalist, social media artisan, and self-identified feminist was perhaps the most energized, passionate, etc.
I attended a lecture of hers Thursday night at Manhattan’s John Jay College of Criminal Justice. I wasn’t familiar with her work prior to arriving, drawn instead by the topic of the evening: the American Muslim woman’s experience, a discussion that I hoped would help me in the ongoing process of better understanding Abida, the female protagonist of my novel. I got what I asked for and then some, though this was as much the product of Mona’s enthusiasm – her vital, frothing, and unapologetic ranting – as anything she said.
In so many words, she gave me a picture of the world I liked, one where the civil war in Libya and the political deadlocks in Tunisia and Egypt haven’t eclipsed the spirit that gave rise to them; where it’s possible to feel as if something truly unprecedented were taking place in the Muslim world, and the world at large, without getting blasted off the intellectual stage for that capital sin of idealism.
The kicker, of course, was Mona’s firm acknowledgment of the reality that everything will fizzle to nothing without that magic thing called work.
Idealists – or at least that obnoxious faction of them that always invite attack – have a tendency to brush work into the margins. Not only did Mona drown us in the overwhelming necessity for work, but she also made the work look beautiful, and, best of all, she bent over backwards (if such an individual can bend backwards at all) to celebrate the work that’s already being done, and the women who are out there doing it.
A featured freeze-frame on her projector centered on the face Tawakel Karman, a Yemeni journalist, human rights activist, member of Yemen’s main opposition party, and the founder in 2005 of Women Journalists Without Chains, as she led a crowd of protestors calling for the resignation of Ali Abdullah Saleh, Yemen’s installment of the Mubarek franchise.
“In that face,” said Mona, pointing at Karman’s photo, “lies the death of all preconceived notions of the Muslim woman.”
She went on to champion Iman al-Obeidy, the Libyan women who on March 26th broke into the Tripoli Hotel housing Western journalists to blast to the world the horrific story of her gang rape at the hands of pro-Qaddafi forces. As Qaddafi loyalists struggled to remove her, al-Obeidy shouted to the rolling cameras, “I am not scared of anything.”
“They heard her,” Mona said, and so did we.
Though she may have drifted somewhat from the lecture’s nominal focus on the American experience, America itself was by no means denied a prominent place in her talk.
To speak of our country as a singular hotbed for democratic exploration is by no means a novel observation, nor is it in any way unique to speak of America’s exploits having rippled across the globe, but what did succeed in snagging my passion was Mona’s construction of America as a place of imported rebellion; as much so as a place of export.
America, she argued, was as much a Mecca as Mecca itself, boasting one of the most diverse congregations of Muslim immigrants on the planet, but where others might have cited the disconnect between these immigrants and their places of origin as a form of liberation, Mona instead stressed that it was precisely the spirit of strength and resistance they brought with them that creates such a strong potential for liberalism here.
She argued further that the miracle of social media – often heralded, but impossible, in my estimation, to be stressed enough – has created a sense of global community where the spirit of revolution transcends nationalities. She pointed to the Egyptian sympathizers, many of them women, who ordered pizza for the protestors in Wisconsin, a conjoining of revolts that ten years ago would have been completely disparate.
Again the word “imported” came to the fore: imported revolution, and imported role models. With another nod to Tawakel Karman, the Yemeni activist, “The role model for America’s Muslims is no longer the suicide bomber: the role model is the revolutionary.”
And in case there was any doubt about where scripture fit in: “I believe Muhammed was a revolutionary. So was his wife. I want to continue their revolution.”
Yeah. Good stuff.
No comments:
Post a Comment