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Iraqi Women Seek Freedom of the Road Again

By Mary Beth Sheridan

BAGHDAD -- The black-masked militias have vanished from most Baghdad streets, and the car bombings are down to one or two a day. So one recent afternoon, Hadeel Ahmed, a ponytailed college student in jeans, did something few Iraqi women have dared recently. She drove a car.

"It bothers me to have to depend on my brother or father to take me everywhere," the 25-year-old student declared, after finishing a class at al-Riyadh Driving School. "I want to be independent."

Since the 2003 U.S.-led invasion, women in the Iraqi capital have virtually disappeared from behind the wheel. With gun battles raging, the police force collapsing and the traffic lights dead, highways turned into a Mad Max world. Even today, you can travel for a half-hour across the sprawling city and not see a single woman driving.

But with the sharp drop in violence this year, women are venturing onto the roads. They are gingerly reclaiming freedoms denied by the Islamic extremists who warned them to stop driving, give up makeup and cover their hair -- or risk death.

Source: [Washington Post]

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Escape to Dubai?

Business is booming right now! I mean, the place has what, double-digit GDP growth? Like, that’s crazy!” Brooke Butler tucks her silken hair behind her ears, flashes a wide smile, and digs into her dumplings. It’s Pan-Asian night at Entre Nous, the restaurant on the ground floor of Novotel Dubai, and Butler, a 24-year-old Texan with an exuberant demeanor and a slim volleyball player’s build, is taking a pause from a long day schmoozing real-estate executives.

She has just spent several hours working the lavish stalls and displays of Cityscape, a four-day conference billed by its promoters as “The World’s Largest Business-to-Business Real-Estate Event,” taking place in a cavernous conference hall next door. After dinner, Butler is due at Çin Çin, a swanky cigar-and-wine bar, to meet the CEO of a real-estate company. “I want to have a million dollars saved and then come home,” Butler says. In Dubai, it is a plausible target, even for a saleswoman only three years out of Dallas Baptist University; she is certain she’ll meet it. But how long will it take?

When she arrived, fresh from being laid off by the San Antonio office of Liberty Mutual, for whom she sold home, auto, and life insurance, she thought that she would be in and out in two years. “I know a girl who made $2 million U.S. in commissions last year,” she said then. “And that’s tax-free! Within a year, I’ll be a millionaire. It’s not that difficult over here.”

Source: [New York Magazine]

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Patience, persistence pay off with visit to Syria

By F. Brinley Bruton

Inshallah, which means “if Allah wills it” in Arabic, is a useful expression in an uncertain world.  I’ve employed it in versions of the following: “I’ll finish this article by this afternoon, inshallah.” “My flight leaves, inshallah, tomorrow at 6:45 a.m.” “Inshallah, we’ll be together again soon.” And most recently: “I’m going to Syria on vacation, inshallah.” For years I’ve wanted to visit Syria and its capital, Damascus, which is thought to be the world’s oldest, continuously occupied city.

I’d heard about Damascus souks — or markets — where buyers and sellers bustle beneath bullet-hole speckled roofs, the remnants of a nationalist rebellion about 80 years ago. Visitors rave about the Umayyad Mosque, one of the most important religious sites in Islam. Then there’s the cuisine, considered by many to be the best in the region.

Apparently, though, Syria didn’t want me. Not surprisingly, the government is wary of American-passport-wielding journalists. The country is officially at war with Israel, which has held Syria’s Golan Heights since the 1967 Six Day War. Alleged support for militant group Hezbollah in neighboring Lebanon has further soured relations with the West.

Source: [MSNBC]

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On Beirut's Hamra street, all are welcome

By Borzou Daragahi

Through their apartment windows or from just over the tops of their newspapers, the artists, writers, students, journalists and lawyers peered at the beefy armed men. They had come before, grimacing young toughs wielding Kalashnikovs, their legs dangling over the sides of pickup trucks, swaggering along the sidewalks, festooning streetlights with their flags.

This time it was the Shiite Muslim militia Hezbollah and its allies, gangs of less disciplined gunmen who burned buildings and terrorized their enemies. But others had tried to impose their will here before, in the one part of this city that has refused to bow to narrow-mindedness and embraces the country’s political and religious melting pot.

Unlike the rest of Lebanon, Beirut’s Hamra Street doesn’t belong to Sunni or Shiite or Christian or Druze. In a Middle East characterized by extremes of poverty or wealth, radical Islamic fundamentalism or compulsive Western-style consumerism, decrepit slums or gated Persian Gulf fortresses, Hamra Street stands out.

Source: [LA Times]

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Iran bans Laleh Seddigh, the 'female Schumacher'

By Darius Bazargan

Iranian women are exploring new boundaries and opportunities in education and careers -- not least female racing car champion Laleh Seddigh -- until that is she was banned from competitions following allegations of engine tampering.

Laleh's story is a symbol of what women can achieve in today's Iran. But her desire to prove she could compete with men at every level ended up costing her dearly.

Role model

The 31-year-old sportswoman, nicknamed "Little Schumacher" is a minor celebrity in her native country. She has also become a poster girl for Iranian women seeking to better their lot.

Source: [BBC]

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Amman: The foods of the Mideast at its stable center

By Danielle Pergament

ON a warm evening last fall, a handful of old men shuffled into Al Quds, a big, overly lit restaurant on a bustling stretch of King Hussein Street in downtown Amman. Platters of syrupy pastries, crispy phyllo shells and fried dough were artfully stacked in the windows. But the men were there for the house specialty: mansaf.

Mansaf, a lamb shank served on a heap of yellow rice with chopped, blanched almonds and warm yogurt sauce, is the national dish of Jordan. But over the past few years, as other cultures and nationalities have moved in, the menu has expanded beyond mansaf and Jordan's culinary borders.

Call it a product of political turmoil. Jordan is smack in the center of the Middle East. In Amman, its capital, you'll find the bright vegetables from Lebanon, crunchy falafels from Syria, juicy kebabs from Egypt and, most recently, spicy meat dishes from Jordan's southern neighbor, Iraq.

Source: [NY Times]

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Plans for 'Desert Louvre' provoke outrage in France

By Molly Moore

PARIS -- The most visited museum in the world -- the Louvre -- is set to open its first international outpost on a currently uninhabited island off the coast of Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates. In the largest foreign museum deal in French history, the petro-rich but museum-poor Persian Gulf emirate agreed last week to pay France $1.3 billion to borrow the Louvre's name and hundreds of its artworks, as well as treasures from the Picasso Museum, Pompidou Center, Chateau de Versailles and other French museums.

French President Jacques Chirac described the mega-museum agreement as an important way of bridging what the "world considers a clash of civilizations" between Islam and the West. To many French art experts and historians, however, it represents little more than putting the nation's priceless patrimony up for rent.

"Appalling!" declared Daniel Alcouffe, 68, an honorary curator of the Louvre who headed its decorative arts department for nearly two decades. He echoed the outrage expressed by some of the country's most prominent art experts and historians. "It's a shame to see France selling out its heritage," he said. The "Desert Louvre," as the French press has dubbed the deal, is part of a revolutionary initiative by France to expand its global influence through its vast cultural heritage and holdings -- the one realm where it remains a dominant world power -- in the face of its shrinking diplomatic and economic clout.

Source: [Washington Post]

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Europe's Muslims: Beyond the Veil

By Fareena Alam

The Dutch government just announced that it's seeking to ban the Muslim veil in public places. The Vatican has declared that veiling shows disrespect for local cultures and sensibilities. German officials in North Rhine-Westphalia say they will discipline Muslim teachers who wear headscarves in defiance of a ban imposed in May. In Britain, Jack Straw recently threw fuel on the fire by suggesting that this bit of traditional Muslim garb "separates people" and hinders integration.

"Communication requires that both sides see each other's face," said Britain's former foreign minister, displaying a mastery of cross-cultural sen-sitivity. "You not only hear what people say, but you also see what they mean." British Muslims immediately wondered how Straw's former cabinet colleague, ex-Home secretary David Blunkett -- blind since birth -- ever did his job.

Perhaps Straw did not intend to wound. But it had been a bad week already. Conservative leader David Cameron was taking jabs at what he called "Muslim ghettos." British tabloids railed about a Muslim cabby who allegedly refused to drive a blind woman because having her dog in the car offended his religious beliefs. Even Prime Minister Tony Blair couldn't hold his peace and called the veil a "mark of separation."

Source: [Newsweek]

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Saudi bloggers push limits to speed reform

By Faiza Saleh Ambah

JIDDAH, Saudi Arabia -- When he was a college student in Washington state, Saudi Arabia's most popular blogger, Fouad al-Farhan, donned a T-shirt emblazoned with "Animal Rights Equals Human Rights" and slept on the campus lawn during a hunger strike protesting the slaughter of foxes.

That type of freedom during six years in the United States gave Farhan a taste for expressing himself that he was unable to satisfy when he returned to Saudi Arabia in 2001. "You can't write whatever you want in the newspaper here; you can't even lift up a poster in protest," said Farhan, 31, a computer programmer who attended Eastern Washington University in Spokane. "On the blog, it's a different world. It was the only way to express myself the way I wanted."

Source: [Washington Post]

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Royal Emirati's career fuels young women's dreams

By Hassan Fattah

For Sheika Lubna al-Qassimi, the most memorable moments typically happen in the shopping malls and public gatherings of this rapidly growing nation, not in the halls of power she navigates every day. They come when young Emirati women approach her to take their photograph with her, tell her their dreams or, best of all, ask her for career advice.

During those moments, she says, she realizes how much has changed for women here since she first started out in business, but she also sees how much farther they still have to go. "I had to prove that stamina and delivering have nothing to do with gender," she told a group of young entrepreneurs recently. "We are the ones who usually discourage ourselves even before anyone else discourages us."

After decades of pushing the barriers in a region where women have traditionally been kept out of the public sphere, Sheika Lubna now towers as one of the country's most influential women. She is the first woman here to be a minister, but no less important, she is the minister of economy and planning, a particularly important position in a nation that is a major oil producer and relies so heavily on foreign investment, and where the economy continues to boom.

Source:[New York Times]

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