The women of Tripoli struggling against the regime
Summary of story from The Star, August 29, 2011
Meet the women of Tripoli struggling against the regime. Most of these women are engineering students in their mid twenties.
Auhood Elkhabule, 25
“Most of the women went out and tried to help the men. But many of them say, ‘We are men, we do it ourselves.’ I couldn’t just sit and say let them do it. Many of my friends have been killed.”
“We have all shared this kind of . . . we call it privacy. They make us feel very scared. You can’t express your mind.”
She says the government have bugged landline calls and monitored mobile calls.
“When my brother called from the US [worried about conditions in Libya] I said, ‘Relax. Nothing is happening.’ A spy came on the line, said, ‘You heard her, right? Everything is ok.’ ”
“Many girls, they can’t kill an insect, even a simple fly. For what Gaddafi did, I want to choke him, burn him alive.”
Randa Al Alam, 26
“Jihad was made for men and women. There is no difference. But we are not warriors.”
Khulood Elkhabule
“You go to get a master’s degree, but you are supposed to be at home and support the men. There is no way for a woman to express her voice. If you insist, you are going to be followed and they try to kill your voice.”
“This is a proper jihad. You don’t choose what you want from the Qur’ran. It’s fixed, it’s right.”
Sanaa Eljerbi, 25
“I was in a group trying to gather money, food, trying to get them to the revolutionaries.”
“We are already under the eyes of the regime, and it was hard to do. We used simple codes, without telling [anyone who might overhear] why we need it.”
Narjes Elshaksto, 28
Instead of holding a gun “I had jihad in a different way: praying for them.”
Farah Al Mohalhel, 25
“Some women wanted to handle guns.”
I really hope that articles like this bring more attention to discussing the meaning of jihad and what it means for men and women.
There is a general consensus that the root of the word jihad is struggle. There’s the greater jihad, which is internal, and the lesser jihad which is external. I read an article a while ago arguing that for women, jihad is the hajj. I’m not sure exactly how many people would agree with this. But the perception of women’s piety as jihad was blown apart by Arafat when he made his “Army of Roses” speech in 2002, followed later that day by Wafa Idris becoming the first woman Palestinian suicide bomber.
The question remains whether men and women will ever be equal in struggle. Apparently, at the height of the IRA, when women were involved in violence, men requested bigger guns. It is the opinion of masculinity theorist Kimmel, that beards are the ultimate expression of masculinity, and they are used by some to maintain the oppression of women.
Arguably, struggle will never be possible across the whole of society without taking the emancipation of women into account. Cynthia Enloe is quick to point out that nationalist struggle may achieve government overthrow, but the replacement power structure is likely to mirror, or imitate, the previous one. It is my opinion that change is more than this, and it won’t truly happen until struggle is felt and enacted upon equally across genders.
Quite horrified by this “article”. Completely empty and just leading us to believe that women are inclined to violence. Pretty much doubt it. They’re usually the victims here.
I don’t think it’s saying that women are inclined to violence. Also, I think we’d be foolish if we only considered women to be victims of violence.
Counter-productive too.
I started my own reply to that but it ended up rather more ranty than I intended. All I really want to retain from it is the question of what women are supposed to do in times of violent revolution if we are not to be ‘inclined to violence’?