The danger of unfulfilled aspirations

When I was just out of University I spent the lion’s share of my time for a couple of years in the Middle East. For half of that time I was in Egypt, a country that I now have a complex love hate relationship with. I have been there so many times for so many reasons and when Dahab was bombed in 2006 I made sure that I holidayed there once again to make my small individual contribution to supporting the tourist industry that the bombers were attempting to destroy.

I love the people of Egypt; they have just the best sense of humour and are incredibly engaging company but it is a complex country and for all the investment into holiday resorts like Dahab and Sharm el Sheik I don’t see much improvement over the 14 years I’ve been visiting the country in the quality of life and the future for Egyptians.

The view from the red sea may be rosy but it is a country where the people live without meaningful political freedoms and plenty of political cynicism, where a command economy keeps people at University studying subjects allotted to them by the state and where the waiting list for a graduate job is six years; something that this article I found in the New York Times yesterday, confirmed is still the case today, no matter that Egypt receives £billions of aid from both America and the European Union.

What does this mean in practice? Well, I had a friend in the early nineties who had a diploma (they would call it a degree in Egypt but it isn’t recognised as such in the UK, by UK Universities) in Agricultural Engineering. But there weren’t any jobs in Agricultural Engineering, so he went and did another years study so that he could become a teacher and then when he applied they just said ‘well that’s very good, we’ll put you on the waiting list we’ll be in touch in about 6 years’. So, he came down to Dahab to work in one of the tourist bazaars there. And now, I find that my friends’ experiences are still being played out across Egypt:

“Education experts say that while Egypt has lifted many citizens out of illiteracy, its education system does not prepare young people for work in the modern world. Nor, according to a recent Population Council report issued in Cairo, does its economy provide enough well-paying jobs to allow many young people to afford marriage.

Egypt’s education system was originally devised to produce government workers under a compact with society forged in the heady early days of President Gamal Abdel Nasser’s administration in the late 1950s and ’60s.

Every graduate was guaranteed a government job, and peasant families for the first time were offered the prospect of social mobility through education. Now children of illiterate peasant farmers have degrees in engineering, law or business. The dream of mobility survives, but there are not enough government jobs for the floods of graduates. And many are not qualified for the private sector jobs that do exist, government and business officials said, because of their poor schooling. Business students often never touch a computer, for example”.

And the aid money from the European Union? Well, don’t worry too much because the road that links Dahab with Sharm el Sheik, the one where you will pass maybe 10 cars in an hour’s journey is having an extra lane each way built! I swear I cannot work out what the purpose of building this extra lane is or what an utter waste of money it is; I tell you, it makes Transport for London look positively sensible!

The article makes the connection between poverty, the inability for the educated middle classes to find work, let alone the illiterate to find work, to be able to marry and the retreat of the young into conservative religion that is being made as a result. And whilst I don’t find the way Galal Amin frames it (not being one to like the idea of ever accepting my ‘lot’) particularly palatable, unfulfilled expectations should be a cause for alarm:

“But more widespread access to education has raised expectations. “Life was much more bearable for the poor when they did accept their social status,” said Galal Amin, an economist and the author of “Whatever Happened to the Egyptians?” “But it is unimaginable when you have an education, to have this thought accepted. Frustration opens the door to religiosity.”

If an individual woman wants to wear the hijab then it is not my place to suggest she can’t but it saddens me dreadfully to see the massive increase in the number of women in Egypt wearing a head scarf. When I was there in the nineties in the towns women covering their hair were in the minority; now, you can more or less assume that if you see a woman’s hair it is because she is a coptic Christian. That the country is becoming more conservative and more religious cannot be in doubt.

The frustration has been there for the last 14 years at least. For me, in my early twenties, the realisation that my Egyptians friends would never be able to come and see me in my home was a disappointment. Worse for them was the knowledge they were unlikely to be able to ever leave Egypt, because even if they could save up the money for the flights they would be highly unlikely to get a tourist visa. Just imagining not being able to get on a place to travel to more or less any country of my choosing brings me out in hives! For them, it was and still is a reality and the implications of that will ripple out to all of us.

“It brings us closer to God, in a sense,” Mr. Faragallah said, speaking of the despair he felt during the years he searched for work. “But sometimes, I can see how it does not make you closer to God, but pushes you toward terrorism. Practically, it killed my ambition. I can’t think of a future.”

His parents built him an apartment so that he would not have to wait to marry. The apartment has been empty for years, though now, at 28 and with his new job, he said he hoped he could support a wife.

“I tell them, my friends still in university, not to dream too much,” Mr. Faragallah said one day while sitting on the balcony of the empty apartment he hopes to one day share with a family”.

What's all this cultural relativism about then?

Gillian Gibbons is freed and the Sudanese Government hasn’t made any contribution to the idea that Islam is a peaceful religion and that followers of Islam are not all fanatics ready to take umbrage at the slightest slur to their religion.

In the UK, it has been pleasing to see that the majority of people commenting, irrespective of their religion or lack thereof have been appalled by the actions of the Sudanese government; at all points there were choices both around the interpretation of the offence and the law and at every point the Sudanese establishment chose the most extreme action.

There has been though, throughout this, whether on BBC comments, Blogs or Any Answers a significant minority of people who have suggested that Gillian Gibbons only had herself to blame, as she should have known the law. She was in fact naive.

I think there is an enormous difference between causing offence and invoking the displeasure or irritation of whoever has been offending (and therefore being marked out as someone you wouldn’t want to spend time with) and being put in prison or lashed for it. The naming of a teddy bear does no physical harm to anybody.

I’m pretty much an atheist and don’t have much time for religion, but I’ve no real interest in going around deliberately causing offence to other people for the sake of it; I think that’s a waste of time, energy and just not very nice. But I believe passionately in free speech and therefore in my right to cause offence without being punished by a state for it.

I’ll give you an example from my own experience where, as an acutely left handed person, I am in danger of causing offence every time I go to the Middle East and without realising it pick up my bread to scoop up some food with my left hand. This is really, really bad table manners; I mean I might as well start picking my nose at the table (in fact, it’s much, much worse than that…but I don’t want to put you off your dinner). Should I be lashed or sent to prison because I have, with no malicious intention broken, in Meral Ece’s words, ‘a few of the cultural 'rules' we learn to live with’,? Sure, don’t invite me to dinner again, suggest I use a knife and fork rather than my hand (as people have) or just tell me plainly not to use my left hand (as an ex-fiancé’s brother once decreed), explain to me the error of my ways, but please don’t send me to prison for it!

Another analogy: this time looking the young woman the other week in Saudi Arabia who was sentenced to 200 lashes for being in the company of a man she wasn’t related to ahead of being gang raped. Now, she is a Saudi, not just a visiting teacher, she surely knew the law? Do we all then sit back, fold our hands on our laps and say: ‘Well, she knew what the law was…how naïve of her!’. No, we don’t, because we know that her punishment under that law is an infringement of human rights, just as the response to Gillian Gibbons was by no means reasonable or just a harmless cultural difference. I make this point not out of a lack of respect for the rule of law in a given country but out of my greater respect for human rights.

Perhaps if Gillian Gibbons had got the lashings she was at risk of, instead of a very short prison sentence and pardon, then not as many people would have found it so easy to slip back into an ‘oh, well, it’s different there’ mentality; but remember it’s not just western primary school teachers that have no freedom of speech or apostasy in Sudan, is it?

Lots of people, from all religions or none know and understand this, I am sure, but lets not forget that human rights are for everybody, absolute and not subject to cultural relativism.

Is mysogyny on the rise across the world? And how would we tell if it was?

Chris K , Rob Knight on Liberal Review and Jonathan Calder have all blogged on the horrific news that a gang rape victim had her punishment, yes, her punishment of 90 lashes increased to 200 for having the cheek to appeal her sentence.

And last week, we heard reports from the Chief of Police in Basra that 42 women in the city had been murdered between July and September for not covering up; which makes me wonder how many women had been beaten or assaulted for the same ‘crimes’? This is not just happening to Muslim women but Christian women as well.

And there! We can see the game is given away; because this sort of behaviour towards women is not as a result of religion as often assumed, but, as a result of militant misogyny.

The UN undertakes country comparisons related to Gender as part of their reports on Human Development. There is the Gender-related Development Index (GDI) and also the Gender Empowerment Measure (GEM). The GDI measures all the same things as the Human Development Index but just splits them by gender, male and female. The second, GEM, looks at the proportion of women that work as political representatives, or are managers, senior officials or work in professional or technical positions. Now, it very easy to pick many, many holes in these two measures and some of the assumptions around what is deemed as being ‘developed’; but they’re there and they’re better than nothing.

But they miss out the day to day impact, which the two examples of rampant misogyny above, have on normal women’s lives. ‘Cos, you see, wonderful though it is that 33% of Iraq’s MPs are women (just under twice as many as in the UK), that doesn’t seem to be helping the women of Basra right now. There will be no direct reduction in the GEM of Iraq as a result of these killings even though, I would suggest that women are seriously less empowered now than they were 4 years ago, as a result.

And of course, Saudi Arabia doesn’t allow women to be empowered at all, but there is a different between a woman getting gang raped and given 90 lashes and one being given 200 lashes. Again, I can’t see where this sort of degradation in women’s rights and quality of life are being measured – although, if anyone does, then do let me know!

I think its time we have a different sort of measure of women’s freedom and rights; one that measures the qualitative impact of misogyny on women’s lives. So one might be able to see that in recent years, Afghanistan’s has gone up as women are at least now allowed out of the house but Iraq’s has gone down because of the type of thing that is happening in Basra. I am not suggesting that this would be easy to do, but we need more than a clutch of newspaper reports to measure these things.

And in the UK, well how does the fact that so few reported rapes actually end in any sort of conviction (5.3% this year, when it used to be 33% in the 70’s) figure in any UN measure of women’s empowerment? Or the fact that so many people think that a women who goes out late at night holds some sort of responsibility for her rape, if she is raped.

Next Saturday, 24^th November will be the ‘Reclaim the Night” march in London at 6pm; last time over 1200 women marched in support of women’s right to go out onto the street free from fear of violence or rape.

Our misogyny may not be hard coded into our penal system as in Saudi and thankfully the women of London are not subject to militia’s going around killing us for being ‘inappropriately dressed’ as in Basra but there’s still plenty of misogyny here, if 1 in 8 men think it’s Ok to hit a woman if she’s been nagging or if a third of us, both men and women, think a women is partly responsible for her own rape if she flirts, has been drinking or is dressing sexily.

Sometimes, it feels to me that as Liberal Democrats see feminism as surplus to requirements, because as liberals we would not discriminate against anybody of whatever sex; but on days like today I know that if we are going to achieve better lives for women all over the world we have to be clear and say that feminism has a vital role to play and has a long way to go before misogyny is overcome; we need to be proud to be feminsts!! Laws (of the legal rather than the David kind) help but they are not enough.

Why do people always think they are the exception?

Ok, Mr McClintock, which bit of the word legislation do you not understand? It is the law that you are not allowed to discriminate against people on the basis of their sexuality. A law that every one of us is subject to whilst we are in the United Kingdom.

What a person chooses to believe, and Christian beliefs are a choice thankfully not predetermined biologically, is not a good enough reason for the law not to apply to that person. For goodness sake, why do ‘committed’ religionists always think that exceptions should be made for them? You choose to believe it; you interpret your book in that way, nobody is making you and nobody should be making an exception for you!

Grrrrr……

On a more positive note I've finally worked out how to deal with the increasingly 'anti-atheist/agnostic' comments that have been cropping up on Thought for the Day; I now make sure I'm blow drying my hair at about 7.50am and I don't get to hear them at all!

Of course, this completely crews up my critical path on the major project that is getting me from my bed into my clients office looking vaguely presentable and professional, but it is worth it.

Better to be into the office 10 minutes later than be continually offended each morning; we only have the one life and it's far too short for that kind of stress!!