A royal decree in Saudi Arabia grant women the right to work in lingerie shops

     'Tis the nature of regimes that thrive on a lack of imagination to create situations that are patently senseless.
     Until very recently, just such a situation prevailed in Saudi Arabia, wherein women, otherwise institutionally partitioned from men in every respect, were forced to interact with their male compatriots in a surprisingly intimate context - when purchasing lingerie.
     For this less than optimal arrangement, Saudi women could thank their society's prohibition on men and women working together, a reality that disproportionately affected employment in the retail sector. This ironic consequence was a culture of male-run stores catering to a female clientele, involving transactions that flatly undermined the codified status of women's modesty.
     A royal decree by King Abdullah has put paid to this folly - the country’s cosmetics and lingerie shops now have until June to replace their male employees with women.
     An informative article in The New York Times helps to keep the move in perspective: "King Abdullah generally supported an expansion of opportunities for women, but steps in this direction can’t be traced to any burst of enlightenment within the royal family. They are happening because the kingdom’s women need and want jobs and are learning how to make themselves heard — and because, in an increasingly expensive country, their husbands often want them to work."
    Nonetheless, the move is a victory for women's self-determination and dignity, one that cannot be overstated.
    It is worth pointing out, also, that women helped make the victory possible.
    At the forefront was Reem Asaad, a financial adviser, writer, and women's rights advocate, who used social media to organize a boycott of the male-run shops, and helped women get trained for retail work.
    In a June 2011 interview with PRI's The World, Asaad echoes my opening sentiments.
    Quite simply, "We no longer accept things that are not logical."

Excerpt from Companions of the Garden, Chapter 12

     A bizarre and profoundly "off-the-map" local campground in southern Virginia:

     In the morning there were pancakes on the open fire, at 10AM, when the daylight hours had come and bloomed and flushed out the details that night made obscure.
     Here a fallen tree that bridged the creek, a cluster of tea bags hanging from its branches.
     Here a string of deer vertebrae, tied together with bailing twine at the end of a grass rope, suspended from a limb, bending in the wind.
     Here a plywood checkerboard with the squares sketched out in charcoal, and pebbles from the creek-bed in lieu of pieces, the two armies distinguished by a single shade of gray. 
    “Checkers,” said Dig.  “I was never any good.”
    He proved it over breakfast: a five-game series, one of which he won.
    He washed the dishes in penance. 
    Knelt by the creek to scrub off the grease.  
    Put his hands in the water and startled up a crawfish from underneath a rock.
    The crawfish watched him for a moment or two, the sunlight glinting off the pinkness of its body, its miniature antennae bending in the current, and then it flicked into motion again, wriggling forward to the safety of Dig’s shadow.  

Excerpt from Companions of the Garden, Chapter 5

     . . . a small knot of teens hung out in the back of a flatbed pickup listening to Beyonce. Dig watched as the solitary woman in the bunch tapped one of her comrades on the shoulder and pointed.  The conversation cut off instantly.  The shoulder-tapped comrade grabbed the brim of his baseball cap and switched it from backwards to forwards, and tipped the brim down low so that his eyes were in the shade.  He raised the bottle of Pepsi to his lips and sipped it with a slowness that could almost be felt.
     Dig crossed the lot and waved at the gang as he passed.  The girl in the truck waved back nervously but the kid with the Coke just kept on looking at Abida, and didn’t acknowledge Dig’s presence.
     One of the young boys with the rope said, “Hey mister,” in a tone Dig couldn’t decipher.  Dig waved again.  The boy waved back.
     A thin concrete median at the end of the lot shielded the grass from errant tire tracks.  Abida stood just shy of the grass line, her eyes on the engine, its wheels resting on a pair of tracks that ran thirty-odd feet on either side, as if to tempt the train into one last delusion of mobility.
     “Typical New Yorker,” said Abida.  “I get to Virginia and the first thing I gawk at is a train.”

Renowned feminist author Nawal al-Saadawi speaks on women and the Egyptian Revolution

     The Egyptian online publication Bikyamasr.com featured an interview with  Nawal al-Saadawi, renowned feminist and author, on the subject of women in contemporary Egypt. Jailed under the Sadat regime, and then banished under Mubarek, Saadawi is not - perhaps unsurprisingly - nostalgic for the old guard, nor is she overly enthusiastic about the prevailing Islamist political parties, which she considers hostile to democracy.
     She argues instead that the political landscape be completely rewritten, and that the integration of women in the democratic process be the overarching priority:
   
     "Women are half the society. You cannot have a revolution without women. You cannot have democracy without women . . . The slogan of the revolution was dignity, social justice and freedom. You cannot have dignity or social justice or freedom without women. The revolution is not only political. The social dimension must be there. The social problems, the culture problems, the legal problems must be changed just as the political law are changed."

      Interestingly, she contends that Egypt, at a cultural level, the level of the people, would have no qualms about backing a female presidential candidate, and that in fact the government, the military, and the Islamist parties and pressure groups are the ones responsible for institutionalizing misogyny. When asked whether or not Egyptians would turn out in mass to vote for a female president, she responded:


    "Of course. Men and women in Egypt are very tolerant toward women. I was a medical doctor in the village and I was examining men and women. You know Egypt has a history of tolerance toward women and Christianity and all religions. We are civilized, not the government . . . It is the government and colonialism. External colonialism. But if you go among people, it is different. My village supported me when I presented my name. And the men before the women. When I was a doctor there they were ready for me to examine them, so it depends about the women, her character, her program, her seriousness . . . "


      While I'm not certain my admittedly limited research on the subject predisposes me to agree, it's nonetheless a moving construct, and one that I'm sure speaks truth about to larger swaths of Egyptian society than is commonly believed.
       On a related note, The Egyptian Gazette ran an article a week before Saadawi's interview revisiting the atrocity of "virginity tests" and the brutal treatment of female protestors by security forces. In a tone I couldn't help reading as rhetorical, the article began, "What is this society, with its laws, institutions and taboos, doing to ensure that women have the right to demonstrate without being humiliated?"
      The answer - far too little. But people are at least being heard.

Excerpt from Companions of the Garden, Chapter 10

    On a winding road in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia, Dig parks the truck so Abida can pray:


     At the edge of the woods, a slender doe broke from the group and stood in place, watching Abida.
     Abida moved.  The doe raised her ears.  Dig felt something shift in his chest, something that bore all the markings of sharpness.
     Abida shifted into a crouch, left leg beneath her, right leg back.  Her eyes were closed but her face was radiant, her smile blissful, her expression colored not just with rapture but also with awareness, as if she could sense the gaze of the animal her closed eyelids had thus far prevented her from seeing.
     Then she prostrated again, and sat again, and she opened her eyes and at last saw the doe.  The doe reacted to her gaze by raising her ears just a few degrees higher, but she didn’t move back.
     Abida’s smile deepened.  She rose to her feet and without a word stepped from the rug and moved toward the doe.
     Dig watched.  Kept quiet.  Enjoyed his exclusion.  Abida with her back to him. Moving toward the woods.
    Twelve feet from the deer, Abida stopped and reached out her hands.  The deer, recognizing a gesture that an endless influx of tourists had rendered all too familiar, took three steps forward and stopped again, and went on watching Abida.  The two of them held that posture for all of the time it took for the sun to be gone – the glow to vanish from the trees – and then the doe dropped her head and entered the woods.
    Dig got back in the truck and started the engine.  Abida got in and fastened her seatbelt.  She was breathing heavily.  She smelled like earth.

Excerpt from Companions of the Garden, Chapter 3

     “One of these days I’m going to find myself in Mecca,” she said, “standing in front of the ka’bala, and I want to do it sooner instead of later, when I’m still fresh enough to know what Hajj is about, but the thing is, I’m one of those screw-ball Muslims who feels like it’s not just a matter of walking up to the stone; it’s a matter of what you bring with you.  Where you come from.  What you are.  And as far as those last two are concerned, the only identity I can claim is ‘Muslim from Astoria.’  Call me crazy, but that’s not enough for me.  I’m also an American, from America.  And it occurred to me after speaking with you yesterday that I –”  
     She stopped again for breath.  
    God, thought Dig.  She’s really talking fast.  
     “ – it occurred to me that I have no idea what that means.  And I want to know, Dig!  I’ve been living in this country for twenty-one years and this right here is the farthest I’ve been from New York.  I want to know America!  Whether I love it or hate it I want to know what it is!  In Saudi Arabia when they come at me with their cheap-shot America bashing, I want to be able to bash them back; something informed and knowledgeable that will blow all their preconceived notions out the window.  And what better place to kick off my education than the American South, traveling with a man I can trust, who respects my right to prayer, and knows enough about my faith to not start harassing me about why I don’t believe in Jesus?!”
She raised her head and caught his gaze.
     “You know we believe in him, right?” she said.
     “Yes,” said Dig.  He tried to steal the moment, to interject something that exceeded a syllable in length, but before he could do so she was off and running again.

Three women representing the Abrahamic faiths weigh in on modesty

     Women's eNews recently ran a fascinating article covering a panel in which a Jewish, Muslim, and Catholic woman discussed the subject of modesty. All three women have made the choice to cover their hair, choices each one of them identify as being very much their own.
     They describe modesty as a personal construct, rather than a societal one.
     "What is inner, that is what is dignified," Bronya Schaffer, a member of Chabad.org, a Jewish group, told Women's eNews. "It is a sense of self-respect, self-dignity and that's what gets projected. It has nothing to do with inhibition. A woman can do anything, be anything but within the context of Jewish law."
     Hajer Naili, the author of the article, who also chooses to cover her hair, echoes this sentiment of intense personal choice: ". . . as a Muslim woman I simply want to follow Islamic guidance. People often assume my family imposed the scarf on me or that it means I am married. I explain that a Muslim woman who wears a veil often does so by choice and there is no link between the veil and marriage in Islam."
     Naili closes by dwelling on another striking aspect of the panel - the degree to which it emphasized the commonality between the world's three major monotheisms: "As I listened to Sister Hill, Sayeed and Schaffer discuss their relation to this piece of cloth I found them sending a beautiful message of peace and co-existence among Christians, Muslims and Jews."