Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

“Consider the outcry from UK feminists over the tragic case of Iran’s Mahsa Amini, who was punished for her ‘improper’ hijab, leading to her death.  Like many, I was incensed by the injustice she faced. The global reaction to Amini’s ordeal sparked a significant feminist movement, with solidarity in the UK, as   activists staged  dramatic hair-cutting protests in the heart of London.  Yet, the dire situation facing Palestinian women and children in Gaza has not benefitted from similarly loud and passionate advocacy. It’s as though feminist ire and power selectively rears its head for issues that fit a decidedly western narrative of liberation – leaving others, such as those in Palestine, in the shadows. Draped in the lofty notion of ‘liberation’, it often imposes western values on women around the globe, leaving chaos in its wake.”

The last existential feminist

A list of songs which have been banned by the BBC over the years

A failed attempt to boost Israeli propaganda

The system of genders within sharia, which included the role of women within families and households, was in many respects flexible. It was shaped simultaneously by religious concepts and the pragmatic needs of society. European colonialism transformed this in two ways. It froze sharia requirements, which had until then been subject to various interpretations in different communities, as a uniform set of unchanging ideas. The rigid separation of women from men who were not  mahram  (not related to them) is one example: what had once been a principled guideline with religious connotations was transformed into a legal dictate enforced by coercion. Colonialism then inscribed those ideas into a static set of civil and criminal codes imposed on local societies and enforced by new courts, military orders and government decisions. What had previously been a pluralistic mix of religious norms and informal practices around gender turned into something radically different: a rigid hiera...

“ A meticulous examination of the messages coming from the spokespersons for and participants in these demonstrations, however, reveals that their true purpose is to turn the clock back far enough so that the apartheid regime in Israel can once again be  marketed as a functioning democracy , allowing the international community to continue turning a blind eye to the crimes it commits.” —  Orly Noy, the chair of B’Tselem – The Israeli Information Centre for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories.

Connecting women’s struggle in Iran to women’s struggle in the US

  Táhireh / Qurrat al-Ayn  (1814/17-1852)

Five books from Algeria

“ We must ask ourselves … equality with what? Do men have such idyllic lives that we want the same for ourselves? In a world where people are valued as economic units rather than as people, to be an equal economic unit must not be the height of our ambition.” – Sheila Rowbotham

A decade of struggles Credit: Transnational Institute

 The struggle for real democracy

Huda Sha’arawi Begum Rokeya

A review of Women vs Capitalism by Vicky Pryce

It's time to get over it Related Liberal feminism is the one that encompasses Marie Claire magazine, Michelle Obama, Christine Lagarde, Malala Yousafzai, Beyoncé and many like them. You have them in almost every country whether with it is a Muslim-majority or a Christian-majority one, from Turkey to Colombia. An example of liberal feminism

Capitalism "degrades and undervalues precisely those who make real social wealth: nurses and other workers in hospitals and healthcare, agricultural laborers, workers in food factories, supermarket employees and delivery drivers, waste collectors, teachers, child carers, elderly carers. These are the racialized, feminized workers that capitalism humiliates and stigmatizes with low wages and often dangerous working conditions." On Social Reproduction and the Covid-19 Pandemic

"The dominant feminist project of the past few decades has encouraged us to forget this fact. Proponents of mainstream feminism have worked hard to collapse the myriad feminisms of the world, each rooted in a different political worldview and a different vision of women’s liberation, into one version of feminism that aligns neatly with the preoccupations and proclivities of our for-profit system." Why I'm a feminist

Britain “The scorn which the angry young men hurled at the establishment was a class resentment but one devoid of any class consciousness,” feminist Lynne Segal writes perceptively in  Radical Happiness: Moments of Collective Joy . In the decades that followed, shaped by race riots, feminism, Thatcherism, the miners’ strike and the collapse of heavy industry and trade unionism, working-class solidarity appeared to fracture. The rise of what’s now called identity politics began. From the the Blitz to Brexit "While in 1931 10% of married women  were in work, that rose sharply to 21% in 1951 and 47% in 1972 It is interesting to draw a c omparison here . If in an industrial power like Britain, an Empire, with 200 years of capitalist development, women became half of the workforce only in early 1970s, how should one analyse the condition of women in Africa and the Middle East? Why Arab women, for example, do not in total terms make half of the workforce? Does that have som...

The seasons after the 'Arab Spring' Related The most dangerous man in Sudan I n socio-economic terms, the 1950s coups/revolutions, especially in Egypt, Iraq and Syria, brought radical changes. The current revolutions have been unable to even articultae similar ones. The Arab uprisings: an appraisal