Support Saudi Women in their Campaign to End Guardianship

I've added a black ribbon to the side bar of my blog to support Saudi women in their "black ribbon campaign" to end guardianship.

"Saudi Women Launch International Campaign Against Guardianship

November 5, 2009 10:16 p.m. EST

The Media Line Staff

A group of Saudi women have launched an international campaign against the kingdom's male guardianship law, on the anniversary of a prominent protest, in which dozens of Saudi women publicly drove their cars through the country's capital.



The campaign calls on supporters all over the world to tie a black ribbon around their wrist signifying a call for Saudi women to be given equal rights to men and an end to the male guardianship system, in which Saudi women are represented by men in all public and official spheres of life.



"We are calling on everybody, both Saudi and non-Saudi, to show their support of Saudi women," Wajiha Al-Huwaidar, the leader of the campaign, told The Media Line. "It's not just about the right to drive, it's everything," she said. "We want to have our lives back, which the male guardianship system took from us. So we are calling for everyone to wear this black ribbon and spread the word."



A statement by campaign organizers called for women to be given "rights to marry, divorce, inherit, gain custody of children, travel, work, study, drive cars and live on an equal footing with man."



"We, Saudi women activists, appeal to all those who support Saudi women's rights, inside and outside the Kingdom, to participate in the campaign by wearing a black ribbon on their wrists as a symbolic and peaceful gesture of their advocacy to Saudi women's rights," the statement read.



Under the motto "we will not untie our ribbon until Saudi women enjoy their rights as adult citizens", the "Black Ribbon Campaign" was launched Friday to mark the anniversary of a famous event on November 6, 1990, in which 47 Saudi women publicly drove cars through the Saudi capital, Riyadh, in a protest calling for Saudi women to be given the right to drive. The women were subsequently detained by Saudi police, had their passports confiscated, and some were fired from their jobs"

Click on the link in my side bar to read the whole article. 

Although the campaign is calling for people to actually wear a black ribbon on their wrist, I think it would be great to get a movement to "wear" a black ribbon on your blog.  So if you support Saudi women in their campaign for equal rights, rights in keeping with those promised to women by Islam, please consider adding a black ribbon to your blog.

Wedding in Pakistan Pt. 1- Mehndi

So I am going to do a series of posts about our wedding in Pakistan and the different ceremonies, etc.  We got married in August of 2006, and we didn't have the full-out traditional Pakistani wedding with all the multitude of different ceremonies.  Basically we had three, a combination mehndi/dolkhi, a nikkah, and what we called a "reception" which I guess was some hybrid valima/rukh satti thing. 

The first thing that happened was the mehndi/dolkhi, the night before the nikkah (the actual religious ceremony).  The day of the mehndi, I went to this salon near M's house to have my mehndi (henna designs) done on my hands and feet.  One of the interesting things about a lot of salons in Pakistan is that they are in people's houses, instead of in a strip mall like here, which was the case with this salon.  I had quite a few pre-wedding beauty treatments at this place, as well as being my first experience with threading, ouch!  Back to my wedding mehndi, the designs were quite elaborate, and reached all the way up to my elbows.  When the lady doing my henna found out that I had not shaved my arms and did not want to shave my arms, she was not happy with me at all.  I have blonde hair and have never shaved my arms, and wasn't about to start, so I decided she was just going to have to deal with it.  (It's not like I'm really hairy or anything anyways!)  I had to sit pretty still for about 4 hours while my henna was done and I couldn't put my arms down because if the henna gets smeared when its wet, then you mess it up.  Plus my SILs left me there alone because they had a lot of errands to do before the wedding, so basically I was stuck in this room for four hours holding my arms out to my side and I couldn't even talk to the lady doing the henna (she didn't speak English and my Urdu was pretty much non-existent at that point). 

Here is what my mehndi looked like soon after getting home from the salon.

When the henna is first applied it dries black and then crusts off to leave the red designs underneath.  I was told to let it fall off naturally, because that would keep the dye sealed in longer and make the color more vibrant.  You can see places where the crust had already started to flake off before the pictures were taken.  I was also told that the darker and more vibrant the henna showed up after the black part fell off, the more auspicious it was for our wedding.  

After we were done with the mehndi, I hurried home to change into the traditional yellow shalwar kameez for my combo mehndi/dholki ceremony that night.

After the guests arrived, we all went upstairs, for the dholki, which is the name of the party and the drum that is played at it.  My sister in law took the drum and we went up stairs, and split, boys on one side of the room, girls on the other.  The girls played the drum, and sang fun songs.  I don't know what they were singing, but they seemed to really enjoy it.

You can see the dholki here in the center of our group of girls. 

At some point during the dholki, the girls began to sing songs making fun of the guys.  The guys would then have to give them money in order to get the teasing song to stop.  Some of the guys would hold out longer than others.  Some guys would try to be cheap about it, and their first offers would be rejected.  Sometimes they would try to trick the little girls, who were acting as the runners, into taking less money, and their mom's would shout, "nahin, nahin," and send them back to their husbands for more.  M's brother in law tried to get away with giving some rupees, and was rejected.  Since he lives in Chicago, they would only accept dollars from him!  With all the money they collected, the girls pooled it together to go out for a nice lunch together.  Considering I have no idea what the songs were saying, I found the whole thing rather hilarious and a lot of fun.

After the singing was over, we all went downstairs to the dining room for a nice dinner of chicken broast from a local restaurant.  I was already looking forward to the next day, and the Nikah, which will be the subject of my next post.  

Veiled Ambivalence

What is up with the obsession with hijab, niqab, and all things "covering" for Muslim women? 

Here's my disclaimer-- I'm a Muslim woman.  I don't wear hijab.  I know all the different takes, arguments, etc., so if anyone wants to read this and then criticize me for not wearing it, or post a bunch of hadith in the comments or whatever, feel free, but its really not going to change my mind, and I've probably read them all a thousand times, so, you might not want to waste your time.  I am not opposed to people wearing hijab, or think it is bad, and in fact I have a lot lot lot of respect for people that do, I'm just not at a point where I can do it. 

When I first converted, I wanted to wear hijab, really really wanted to.  But then I had a conversation with M that went something like this, M- people who see you wearing hijab will think you are oppressed, people who see me with you wearing hijab will think that I am your oppressor.  Ouch, I could see his point.  We all know that its not true, but it is what people will think.  And I can say I don't care what people think about me (true, to some extent), but I do care about what people think about M and about how what I do affects his life as well, so hijab was put on the back burner for a while. 

Meanwhile, once my hijab-obsession was quelled for a while, it freed my mind to really delve into other aspects of Islam that had been pushed aside while I had been focusing exclusively on how I dressed.  I felt more connected to Allah and more spiritual.  I began to discover what it meant to me, personally, to be a Muslim, and what I wanted my relationship with God to be.  I'm still discovering. 

Meanwhile, I keep reading current events dealing with Muslims and Islam, I am reading Muslim blogs, main stream media reports, etc.  There is so much focus on the veil, hijab and niqab, it's like an unending drumbeat through the internet.  Every cliched article on women in Islam has some title like "Going behind the Veil" or "Islam Unveiled."  It's as if we, as women in Islam, are purely defined by our veils.  Western politicians pontificate on relieving Muslim women from their oppression by banning the veil, saving us from a prison of polyester/cotton blend.  Education, health care, birth control, protection from violence, equality in legal rights are all issues tacked on as an afterthought, as if, somehow, if we could just get women to de-veil, all these problems would be solved for them.  Simultaneously, women who veil seen as more conservative, more religious, more pious, dare I say more fundamentalist, than those who don't.  Women who don't veil are seen as irreligious, presumed to disapprove of those who do, or to follow a more "modern" version of Islam. 

All these presumptions based off a little piece of fabric, about who I am, who you are, what we believe, how we feel. 

We Muslims don't help the issue of veil obsession.  We obsess about it too.  As I mentioned before, I spent a large part of my early days as a convert doing just that.  Our mosques are so obssessed with veiling and segregation that our communities become fractured, and our youth become disenchanted with the mosque as a community center.  Our mosques offer no safe space for youth to interact with members of the opposite gender in a halaal way, and to build the foundations for our young people to lead the mosques in the next generation, working together for the interests of both genders. 

Instead of discussing spirituality, prayer, introspection, tawhid, and other ideological doctrines of Islam that could provide inspiration and a foundation for the next generation of American Muslims, we continue to focus and harp on hijab and segregation. 

Overseas, Muslim insistence on the morality of society being pinned on the bodies of women and obsession with regulation of women's clothing, in my mind, must contribute to Western obsession and focus on hijab as an overriding issue for Muslim women. 

If we didn't obssess about it so much, would everyone else?

As for my own feelings, at this point, I am ambivalent.  I do not honestly believe that I can wear hijab and be successful in my chosen career.  I do believe that hijab is a beneficial act in Islam, and maybe one day I will wear it, but not yet.  And I definitely have plenty of other things I personally consider more important to get right in my own spirituality first.

Gotta do some lawyerin' and other odds and ends

I am supposed to go to trial in 2 weeks.  It is my first trial ever.  I am not going to be actually doing anything in the trial, but I will be a "support attorney" (I guess).  Which means a lot of behind the scenes grunt work.  But I'm not complaining, I'm really excited.  Our cases rarely ever go to trial, so when they do, it is a great opportunity for everyone involved.  Anyway, all of that is a long way of explaining why I haven't posted in a while and why I probably will be sporadic in my posting until November.  I want to do a series of posts on my wedding in Karachi next, and have even started writing them, but I have to go and find the right pics off one of our many hard drives full of thousands of pictures.  So hopefully I can do that soon. 

This weekend we went to the Arboretum to their Pumpkin patch and took some fall-themed pictures.  We had a lot of fun even though the weather was gloomy and M got some great shots.  I think he is a great photgrapher and have tried to encourage him to enter some contests, freelance or something.  I think maybe I will post some of his work on here and let you all see it because I am so proud of him. 

It was so cold for Dallas, already in the 50's.  It's like we skipped fall and went straight to winter (50's is winter in Dallas for all you northerners :) ).

Little D looks more and more like a little boy and less like a baby every day.  Where does the time go?

Call Me Amma

So I don't want to make this blog all about my kid, Little D, which I could easily do, being the braggy besotted mommy that I am, but I know that not everyone in the world wants to hear about how many cheerios Little D had for breakfast today, so I promise not to let this blog devolve into that (although as a mommy, I like reading other mommy blogs!)  Anyway, one of the things I am really interested in has been learning about raising bilingual children.  M and I are really making an effort to raise Little D in a bilingual environment and I think there are a lot of benefits to it, but it can also be very confusing and there is a lot of conflicting information out on the web about raising bilingual kids.  Since Little D stays at home with M during the week, M and I are trying to make sure that M talks to him in Urdu as much as possible, because I figure that he will get plenty of exposure to English from me and my family and later from school and just generally being surrounded by English all the time.  I am not worried about it at all.  Both of my nieces, who are 7 and 5 now spoke only Urdu with their parents early on, and now are fluent in both Urdu and English with no accent in English whatsoever.  (I can't tell if they have an accent in Urdu, not being fluent in it myself). 

Little D as of now seems to be pretty much bilingual.  I try to speak to him in Urdu a lot too, mainly because it also helps me to keep learning at the same time.  For a while, I considered the one-parent, one language strategy, which is where each parent speaks only in their language to the child, but after speaking to some other people who have raised bilingual kids who didn't follow this method, I decided that it wasn't necessary.  I like being able to talk with Little D in both because it helps me to keep practicing my Urdu and it also follows the natural flow of language in our house pre-little D, which was a general mix of both languages (in an attempt to help me improve my Urdu).  M's English is pretty much perfect, and sometimes he corrects me, so he doesn't need any practice. 

So at 16, almost 17 months, here is Little D's progress so far: 

Of course, his first word was Baba (daddy in Urdu), followed closely by Amma (mommy), although for the longest time he would only cry Amma, as in AAAAMMMAA, when he was upset, he would never just come up to me and say Amma, like he would to his Baba.  Now he will look at our pictures and point and say Baba, Amma.

After that came dudu, which he still says uddu or uggu.  (Milk in Urdu), then ball, and then juice, which he says for everything that is wet that is not dudu.  So juice is juice, water is juice, coke is juice, even rain is juice!  He also says quack, for any bird, but especially ducks.  And nok, (nose in Urdu), sometimes nok and quack get confused.   

Then book, and now his favorite word for the last few days is juta (shoes in Urdu, don't know if I spelled that right).  Also lately added to the repertoire is choo choo.

So far seems like he is pretty even on English and Urdu.  As a language nerd, I am finding his language acquisition fascinating (and from a bragging mommy standpoint, I just like to talk about it, ha!)

Humpity Bumpity

When I went to Karachi in 2006, we went to the beach with M's friends one day.  The beach we went to was really far away from M's house.  Karachi is a port city, right on the water, so there are a lot of beaches relatively close to M's house, with the nearest probably being Clifton.  However, M and his friends wanted to go to a less crowded beach that would be more fun and where there would be less people to pay undue attention to me, so we drove about an hour to the other side of the city to go to the beach.  We spread a blanket, had a picnic and walked by the waves.  Some of M's friends' wives and I waded out a little bit into the water and then went for a walk on the beach.  As it started to get dark, a man came by with a camel offering camel rides for around 25 rupees.  So of course I jumped at the opportunity for my first (and hopefully last!) camel ride.  It was not very much fun at all in my opinion!  The camel's "saddle" seemed to be very precariously attached to it, and when it stood up with M and I on board I realized just how tall it was and how it was probably going to hurt if we fell off.  We humpity bumped down the beach and back.  The camel getting up and down is probably the scariest part.  So I can say that while I am glad that I had one camel ride in my life, I probably won't be sad if it I don't have to ride on one again!

At the beach with M's friends.

Our noble steed

Humpity Bumpity down the beach

I look much more confident than I was!

I have to be off next week to celebrate a holiday, I just don't know when...

Eid Mubarak to everyone!  Yesterday was Eid here in the States, it's today in Pakistan.  Because Muslims celebrate Eid based on the visualization of the new moon (there is a more technical explanation for this, but I don't know how to explain it), Eid can be on different days in different parts of the world.  In the U.S., because every mosque does their own thing, a lot of times Eid can be on different days for different groups within the U.S.  It gets pretty confusing and sometimes frustrating.  I don't know why, but we almost always celebrate Eid here in the U.S. a day after the Sunnis do.  This year was the first year since I converted that we have both celebrated it on the same day.  Every year on the night of the 29th, we start checking our mosque's website, seeing if they have declared Eid.  It can be quite suspenseful, and while it would be nice to know way ahead of time when Eid will be, it is kind of fun to have the anticipation of checking and checking and checking the website to see if the moon has been spotted.  Then there is a frantic dash to get everything ready for the next day.  Presents wrapped, house cleaned and decorated (this year we had adorable balloons and center pieces from NoorArt), gathering all the ingredients to make a big meal and the traditional Sheer Korma. 

Another thing about Eid being slightly unpredictable is that it makes things a little hard at work.  I always never know how to handle it.  I always feel kind of strange saying, "I need to be off one day next week.  Which day?  Well, I'm not really sure, could be Monday or Tuesday.  I won't really know until the night before.  Why?  Well, its like Muslim Christmas...yeah, we don't know what day our holiday is going to be on yet."  Lucky for me, I work in a place where people are rather understanding, and as an attorney, I have some flexibility in my job to take off whenever I feel like it, meaning there is no set amount of vacation or any schedule that I have to follow.  Initially I was going to take today off, but we are supposed to go to trial in a little more than a week, so it was either yesterday or today that I was going to have to work.  (The flip side to this flexible schedule is that if you have to work, you have to work, whether it's a weekend or late at night, if something has to get done now, you have to do it). 

So yesterday we had a great Eid.  We went to the masjid (mosque) for the Eid namaz (prayers).  The nice thing about our masjid is that they have two sessions of namaz, so M went for the first one, while I sat on the women's side with Little D and visited with my friends, then we listened to the Eid khutbah (sermon), and then I give Little D to M so that I could say the prayers at the second session.  Afterword there was a nice breakfast and a carnival with some food and bounce houses for the kids (although Little D is too little to go in them, and he was sad that he couldn't!)  While I was saying the second namaz, Little D played on the toddler playground with M.  He loves the slide!  After that we left the masjid, picked up some mithai (Indian style sweets) and went to my parents' house for lunch, which was nice.  Then we took family pictures all dressed up in our Eid clothes.  I told Little D to ask his grandfather for Eidi, so he held his hand out and my dad gave him five dollars, which I thought was really cute.  Even though my parents aren't Muslim, I think they had a fun time celebrating Eid with us.  Then we went home, and changed and went out to dinner at a delicious desi buffet down the street from our house.  Back again and opening presents, Little D got some Arabic Blocks and a really cute picture book about Ramadan called Under the Ramadan Moon.  I love the pictures in this book!

Because my gift from M hadn't arrived yet (or Little D's gifts from family), we have decided to have a traditional three days of Eid, just like in Muslim countries.  Tonight we will open more presents, and I am going to make a big dinner, and afterwards Sheer Korma, since we didn't get time yesterday (also because of another reason that I will explain in a different post).

So Eid Mubarak whichever day you are celebrating on, may you have a blessed day!