Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, December 1998, pages 67-69

California Chronicle

Muslim Women’s League Audience Demands Encore From Islamic Feminist Poet Mohja Kahf

By Pat and Samir Twair

“Right on!”

“That’s right, Sister!”

“More, more, more!”

No, I wasn’t at a rock concert or a political rally, I was at a poetry reading given by the Muslim Women’s League. The poet was Mohja Kahf, a professor of comparative literature at the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville. Attired in khaki slacks and a red blazer, Kahf was the epitome of a young professional. Her mark of distinction was a hijab emblazoned with red, blue, yellow and green polka dots.

From the moment she bounded to center stage and took the microphone, Kahf’s self-confidence signaled her listeners they were in for something unusual.

“From the patios of the Alhambra I come

and out of the fountains of the Taj Mahal.

Hispano-Arab women sang me

in Andalusia, in forgotten vernaculars

Palestinian women embroider me into the breastplates of dresses

I flow like wine through the Rubiyat of Omar Khayyam

and like blood through Ibn Sina’s Textbook of Medicine

I am carved into Baghdadi doorframes and was once

whispered passionately by the concubines of Harun ar-Rashid…”

These opening lines of her poem, “From the Patios of the Alhambra,” stunned the audience of some 100 women—many wearing hijab—into a pin-drop silence. Perhaps they had expected to hear a soft-spoken romantic, but the vigorous realist voicing emotions they may have held in their subconscious but had never expressed brought them to their feet applauding for more.

Soon Kahf was drawing laughter from her audience as she cued them to chant the chorus and title of her poem “I Love a Man Who Washes My Dishes.”

Even more laughter erupted with her poem about “More Than One Way to Break a Fast.” She offered a one-liner from her poem “Men Kill Me” because “they think the sun is just for them.” She turned more serious as she recited from “The Woman Dear to Herself” who “has breast exams and wears running shoes.”

While the “queen,” the woman who knows her dignity and beauty, is the woman dear to herself, Kahf also writes about the noble potential in every man, the “gentle knight” who is the counterpart to the “queen.” In another poem celebrating the vitality of Arab men, she praises them for knowing how to “cushion the tumbles of small children without pausing in converation.”

The vivacious poet’s mother—her head covered by a white hijab —laughed uproariously at many of her daughter’s lines but shyly bowed her head when Kahf introduced her. The poet explained she was three years old when her parents left Damascus in 1971 for the University of Utah, where her father earned a Ph.D. in economics and her mother received a bachelor’s degree in pharmacology.

Sometimes her poetry deals with immigrant experiences. One such poem, “Hijab Scenes, No. 3,” describes the frustrations of a friend who wears hijab and was continuously ignored at PTA meetings when she raised her hand to volunteer for a project.

Kahf’s feminist leanings were reflected in her comment: “Men in our community always have something to say about our bodies—how much we are covered up or how much our bodies are exposed.” This led to a few lines from another work:

“My breasts don’t want to start revolutions

or become prisoners of war.

My body is not your battleground

My womb is not the cradle of your soldiers.”

These sentiments belie the fact that she has been married for 13 years to Najib Ghadbian. “My husband’s laughter appears again and again in my poetry,” she commented.

For three years, they endured a commuter marriage while he worked in the United Arab Emirates. More recently, he has moved to Fayetteville, Arkansas, where he works as a free-lance writer and translates her poetry into Arabic.

The two scholars—he has a Ph.D. in political science from City University of New York, she has a doctorate in comparative literature from Rutgers University—have two daughters, aged 4 and 9. It was her husband’s translation of her work that brought Kahf an invitation last summer to read her poetry to the Emirates Writers Union in Abu Dhabi and the Jordanian Writers Union in Amman.

Her poems have appeared in literary magazines and anthologies as well as in Naomi Shihab Nye’s latest anthology, The Space Between Our Footsteps. “From the Patios of the Alhambra” will be published in the forthcoming Radius of Arab American Writers, edited by D.H. Melhem and Leila Diab.

The audience at the Sept. 19 Muslim Women’s League gathering demanded encore after encore until Kahf voiced a parting salutation:

“You are poems

I am only your stenographer

You are the only epics left in the world.”

League members also honored at the arts program were violinist Dalia Trad, who performed a Bach gavotte and the Fantasia Op. 86 from “Norma,” and pianist Neeva Ozgur, offering a medley of popular tunes. The prize-winning lace work of Ramsa Salifendic was exhibited, as well as the art work of Nasreen Haroun, Samira Idroos and Kamilla Jeevanjee.

Amnesty Focuses on Palestinian Refugees

If Mohja Kahf is likely to become the poet for a generation of Muslim women, then Elham Bayour is a potential political voice for Palestinian women under 30. Bayour discussed Palestinian women who have been released from Israeli prisons and returned to Gaza at an Oct. 3 meeting of Amnesty International’s Women’s Human Rights Committee at the stunningly lovely Mount St. Mary’s campus overlooking the new Getty Center and the Pacific Ocean.

The setting may have been beautiful, but Bayour’s message was shocking. She described the suffering of the Palestinian people, particularly the one million living in Gaza, where 75 percent of the population is confined to eight refugee camps and more than 74 percent of the work force is unemployed.

Bayour said the Israelis drove her family from the Galilee village of al-Bassa in 1948. Now she is a member of the third generation to live in a refugee camp in Lebanon.

“I don’t know which is harsher—to be a refugee in one’s own country as the Palestinians are in Gaza and the West Bank or in a foreign land,” she said.

Now working for her master’s degree in women’s studies at UCLA, she traveled at her own expense for three months this summer to research the conditions of Palestinian women who have been discharged from Israeli prisons.

“I never thought I would see al-Bassa, the village of my family, or meet with Palestinians of the Galilee who had remained,” Bayour continued. She did, however, and showed slides of the ruins of al-Bassa’s church and mosque, which now are used to stable sheep. Houses of the village have been replaced by Israeli factories.

Nothing, however, had prepared her for the squalor of Gaza. “More than 230,000 Palestinians are jammed into the Beach Camp, where sewage is in the water that is fetched from public faucets on unpaved streets,” she stated. “Conditions in this camp would terrify any social scientist. People living like this will react violently sooner or later, and an eruption of rage is overdue. Fifty years of social oppression and economic deprivation have gone hand-in-hand with total neglect of the emotional well-being of people denied all human rights. A price must be paid for this.”

Even though most Gaza Palestinians have no income, they are expected to pay for rice and oil sold to them by the Israelis. “I have seen children as young as 3 years old peddling on the streets, hauling loads of goods for probably three shekels ($1) a day. The children of Gaza suffer from anxiety disorders brought on by the distress of overcrowding and fathers who have no livelihood. Now the Israelis have even prohibited the Palestinians from fishing in the sea—three fishermen were shot to death for violating Israeli boundaries while I was in Gaza.”

Bayour did not have much good to say either about Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat. “Why did they call it Authority?” she asked rhetorically. “Because it was the most authoritarian word they could choose? The Israelis may have 10,000 Palestinians in prison, but the PA police have murdered 20 Palestinians under their detention.” During her stay in Gaza, Bayour was hosted by Dr. Eyad El-Sarraj, director of the Gaza Community Health program, and his sister, Shadia El-Sarraj, director of the Women’s Empowerment Project.

The only health care available to Palestinian refugees in Gaza is offered by UNWRA, Bayour noted.

While four Palestinian women still are in Israeli prisons, there are an estimated 1,500 to 2,000 women who have served time in Israeli jails since 1969. Bayour prepared case histories with 30 female former prisoners and will continue her research in December.

Former women prisoners fall into two categories, Bayour explained. “Those women who were associated with the PLO generally came from moderately well-off families and now have jobs with the PA. Women affiliated with the PFLP or the DFLP come from the lower socio-economic echelons and are looked upon as deviants. They have no jobs, there are no support groups for them. There were 10 documented suicide attempts by these women in just one month last summer,” she continued.

“These are forgotten women. They deserve help.”

MEF Learns About CPTers

Hope for the Palestinians may come from the Worldwide Web if Prof. Fred Bush of Fuller Seminary can inform enough people. At a Sept. 20 meeting of the Middle East Fellowship, Professor Bush distributed an impressive array of handouts pinpointing how concerned Americans can voice their objections to Israeli demolitions of Palestinian homes.

Anyone with e-mail service can learn about the valuable work of Christian Peacemaker Teams, which monitor Israeli abuses of Palestinians, by hooking up to http://www.MennoLink.org/email/register.html. The Israeli government’s systematic destruction of Palestinian dwellings now threatens 1,000 Palestinian families.

Also on hand for the meeting was Laurel Nelson, who has returned from one year in the Middle East as a young adult volunteer for the Presbyterian Church, USA.

Nelson said that her first two weeks back in the U.S. had been frustrating as she confronted the wall of American ignorance concerning the brutal treatment of the Palestinians.

Nelson spent much of her time with Sabeel, a Christian Palestinian organization that is seeking justice and peace by empowering the community to work for these goals.

“For the first six months, I did my best to remain neutral, to try to make sense of both versions of what is going on between the Israelis and Palestinians,” Nelson said. However, she saw the light as she observed an “extremely ingrained oppression which cuts to the hearts of the peoples’ lives in a systematic way. I watched it every day as I talked to the Palestinian victims.

“What really hit me were the Palestinian homes destroyed for no reason,” she recalled. She praised the Mennonite Christian Peace Teams who immediately release on-site news of house demolitions.

“The least we can do is defend these helpless peasant people,” Nelson said. The only hope, she stressed, is to clear up the ignorance and make Americans aware of the Israeli policy of destroying Palestinian homes.

She will be working during the coming year for Search for Justice and Equality in Palestine/Israel in Framingham, MA. The e-mail address is: search25@aol.com

Arab American Festival

An estimated 14,000 visitors attended the third Arab American Day Festival sponsored this year at Cerritos College under auspices of the Arab American Council. Huge flags of Saudi Arabia, Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Palestine, Jordan, Egypt, Sudan, Algeria, Morocco, Yemen and Tunisia were the centerpiece of the college square. The largest of the 72 display sectors belonged to Saudi Arabia, which offered educational materials on the kingdom. A highlight of the daylong event was live entertainment provided by Syrian singer Samir Rizk and Lebanese singer Fidel Fayad.

A special feature at the Arab American Press Guild booth was the appearance of author Antonio Saba, who signed his new novel, The Sands of Vengeance. The steamy saga is based on the true story of twin brothers born in Egypt to an American mother and Egyptian father and their struggles against the corrupt monarchy in the 1930s. The book reads like a movie script and should make a great action film.

Saudi National Day

The Grand Ballroom of the Beverly Regent Hotel was the setting for a traditional reception marking the 66th National Day of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Dr. Sami Ibrahim, Saudi Minister at Large, welcomed the more than 400 guests in the absence of Consul General Mohammed A. Salloum who had traveled to Washington, DC for the visit there of Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah bin Abdul Aziz

Druze Poet Gives Reading

The American Druze Cultural Center in Eagle Rock hosted a reception Sept. 19 for poet Yussef Abdul-Samad. The Lebanese-born poet traveled from New York for the reading from his latest collection of poems, entitled To the First From the First. His works include tributes to Syrian poet Nizar Qabbani and to Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish.

CAIR Gains Momentum

“Putting Faith into Action: Empowering American Muslims” was the theme of the annual conference of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) Oct. 10 at the Los Angeles Airport Hilton. The vitality of the four-year-old organization was obvious in the youth and enthusiasm of more than 1,000 Muslims on hand to hear former Congressman Paul Findley and Dr. Jamal Badawi, a professor at St. Mary’s University in Halifax, Canada.

Executive director Nihad Awad recalled how CAIR was founded with just 30 members and a staff of two people in Washington, DC. Now, with the professionalism of Ibrahim Hooper, CAIR’s media director, and a former ABC producer, CAIR is leading a new generation of Muslims who “are breaking the silence and challenging the lies” about Islam.

Awad announced that CAIR will react to the anti-Muslim film, “The Siege,” which opens nationwide in November, by having members at movie houses throughout the country. “We will not protest the message of the film, instead we will greet movie-goers with invitations to visit a local mosque,” he continued.

Pointing out that Muslims are noted for building mosques and schools in the United States, Congressman Findley urged them to start investing in the future welfare of their families by allocating a certain sum from the family budget to donate to their congressional representative.

“It is important for you to become recognized by the staff of your congressmen—it is the staff that keeps their boss informed of what his constituents want,” he said. “Be sure to thank your congressman for bills he signs that you approve of, offer to help in his local office and always try to send a campaign contribution.”

CAIR arranged keynote speaker Dr. Badawi’s appearance to include three lectures at Southland universities. On Oct. 9, he spoke with Dr. Maura O’Neill on “Jesus in Islamic and Christian Traditions” at UC Irvine. “Islam and Christianity: Similarities, Differences, Common Concerns” was the title of an Oct. 10 discussion at USC with Dr. Joseph Jabbra. “The Abrahamic Connection between Jews, Christians and Muslims” was the topic of an Oct. 11 talk at UCLA with Rabbi Dr. Elliot Dorff and the Rev. Dr. George Grose. For information on tapes of these programs, call CAIR at (714) 776-1847.