"Muhajababes" is the term BBC producer Allegra Stratton coins to refer to "The veiled but sexily dressed young women filling the streets of the Middle East."This is also the title of the book she wrote about travelling in the Middle East and talking to young people there.
According to The Daily Star reviewer, the book concludes that "Arab youths, the largest sector of the population, are having their own revolution. They smoke, wear tight jeans, drive too fast and talk about sex, all the while maintaining the appearance of being "good" Muslims by encircling their heavily made-up faces with scarves."
Notice how easily the so called "Muhajababes" become representatives of "Arab youths" in general. What happened to the male part of "Arab youths"? How do they "maintain the appearance of being 'good Muslims?'"
And what about the burkini? Shouldn't owning the five-piece swim suit be mandatory for every "Muhajababe" ?
Also according to the above defintion, if you are a non-smoker, and your jeans are broken into, and you drive fast but not too fast, and you have sex instead of talking about it, and you don't veil, you Do Not qualify as a revolutinary.
Now, I'm depressed.
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18 comments:
..."veiled but sexily dressed young woman filling the streets of the Middle East."
Streets of the Middle East? That's alot of streets!
Her book addresses a new Middle East that is "...cool, sexy, and devout" Well, what makes that different than the "old" Middle East that was cool, sexy, and devout?
Ah, good old generalizations about Arab youth with a new word like "muhajababes" to throw in the mix. No wonder the discourse never changes, it's the same old type of redundant, "real culture-on-the-way" reporting as usual.
When the guys start wearing burkinis, now there's a story!
BBC might have saved the travel budget and kept Allegra home writing about Catholic schoolgirls…but then they’d forfeit the reliable profit margins of Orientalism.
Well the west – like Freud’s fascinated infant – has never tired of playing peekaboo. (The infant grew up, however.)
Jack Straw: They’ve got to be hiding something under there! It’s a smirk…no, it’s a bomb! No, wait, it’s Nabokov! No, wait, it’s lipstick and sex...for me! And a pile of speeding tickets and a pack of Marlboros. Whatever it is, I demand you show me; out of politeness; I mean security; I mean social cohesion; I mean for your own liberation!
Leila Khaled smokes – I wonder if she drives fast?
haybro,
u r absolutely right. same old thing but with a new title. Apparently, the book is all over Beirut.
kb,
lol. That's awsome.
Leila Khalid doesn't stand a chance. Compared to this revolutionary generation the writer talks about, she's a middle aged washed out Marxist.
"Leila Khalid doesn't stand a chance. Compared to this revolutionary generation the writer talks about, she's a middle aged washed out Marxist."
Hey! Middle-aged Marxists represent!
Leila Khaled, Angela Davis, Selma James... I could only wish to be that washed-out in twenty years!
Anyhow Khaled hasn't taken the veil, but the plastic surgery should count for something. She'll always be a muhajababe to me.
So: is Subcommandante Marcos a muhajadude?
Honestly, this sounds like total BS. People do such a bad job trying to define the youth of their own culture that they have ZERO credibility in trying to define the youth of another culture. I would not want this woman, who I think is 25 herself, to speak on behalf of all Western youth.
I read another review of this book: "Most important is the tension involved in being Islamic but not excessively so. One young Cairene says she wears the headscarf to show she is devout. She also smokes (forbidden in the eyes of some Muslims) to demonstrate that she is not 'one of them'." This is just... horrible. Come on. Smoking doesn't make you cool, or liberal, or secular, or enlightened. I actually feel sorry for this girl, although I probably shouldn't, because it's her business and not mine.
Is that the new middle east? Is that the new generation? Ugh...this book seems so depressing.
Just out of curiosity, I would like a 25 year old woman from an Arab country to come here and write about about our youth. I'm curious what word she'd use to describe us. Christobabes?
Arianne-
unless she's Hysri Ali or Brigitte Gabrielle or what's the name of the others Amal? Irshad Manji...she wouldn't be published...
But, where the hell did she go in the Arab world? Did she go to the Maghreb or is that Africa, France, Sarcozy-lite???
She should have come to Dearborn, too, no?
Again, I the veil wins: discourses about it seem to be perennially seductive even though really really unproductive...
Amal, is this also something we should read? My goodness, we keep pouring money in their pockets as they write shit and compel us to expose it, but they have already won once we have bought it..
ng,
Why not just go to the public library.
good suggestion, even though I would hope that the public library does not carry these books...
When will there be a book that talks about issues that effect arab women like access to education and jobs, war and occupation from a female perspective.
I understand more how this veil literature depoliticizes and avoids talking about more relavent issues like war, occupation, racism, and poverty that effect women.
This is orientalism for Arab women.
Who is Leila Khaled? I know a marxist Leila Ahmed who wrote a great book about women and the developement of Islam.
PFLP militant who hijacked a plane, then got some plastic surgery and hijacked another.
There's a great docu film about her. Also her autobiography. For a while the photo of her - with kuffiyeh, rifle, and this fabulous ring made of a grenade pin wrapped around a bullet - was about as iconic as the Che picture all the kids now have on their backpacks, or Huey Newton in the wicker chair. (Or I guess Patty "my name is Tanya" Hearst with the red dragon)
I wonder why Warhol never made a silkscreen of it actually.
But Ahmed is great too. En garde, Martha Nussbaum!
Reem,
Just for the record, leila Ahmed is NOT a Marxist. Not even close. Otherwise, she'd be the first Marxist working at Harvard's School of Divinity, which would be something.
What is Leila Ahmad? I am reading her book and she sounds like a historical materialist to me?
I think the MuhajaBABE phenom is great. Why the hell not?
If hijab is going to be widespread (as it is becoming now, and as it was in the traditional pre-modern past), it's going to encompass all sorts of women who wear it for all sorts of reasons. In pre-modern times when it was the social norm, it didnt mean any one set thing about you. A prostitute would wear it just as much as a middleclass housewife. A pious person and a freethinking philosopher. It was just like jeans. You just pulled it on. It's still that way in some countries. U.A.E., say. You just pull it on. Shrug. Not oppressive, not mandated by law in the Emirates, just social norm for Emirati women. Within which there are tons of variations and nuances. It's not One Thing.
And this book at least sounds like one of the first western descriptions of veiling that doesnt equate it with "oppressed, repressed..." etc.
The veil is an empty signifier.
It means whatever the particular context, locale, time, make it mean, a dozen different things in different sectors of the same country, different years of the same decade. It does not have an essential meaning.
This is maybe a step toward understanding that?
Toward dismantling the "this is what the veil means" line that BOTH Islamists and you secular Arab chicks want to put on it, :P Amal! :)
and the One Meaning (whatever it is du jour) that various Orientalist & neo-orientalist discourse and Jack Straw and etc. want to put on it.
Only when you secularist babes stop fussing over it and being annoyed by it as much as the religious types do but in the reverse direction, will it come to rest as an empty signifier and will people stop obsessing over it. Until then, you're as guilty of making it an issue as they are-- so don't complain, habibaatiy!
:))
-Damascene Queen
So what is exactly the line "we Arab secular chicks" are putting on the veil?
Maybe it's time for you to get off some of your assumptions about "us"!
Even an "empty signifier" has a shape and a size. That is, in order for it to signify at all there must be _some_ limits on its referential possibility.
This might sound hopelessly abstract, but it's actually a deeply political argument.
"So what is exactly the line "we Arab secular chicks" are putting on the veil?"
ok ok i knew that was kinda unfair when i said it. but thought it'd provoke more exploration anyway.
ok, so I dunno. how about: you seem irritated by its presence (the veil), usually?
& yes kb, agreed, not infinite, some dotted-line brackets around the referential possibilities. in any one era, anyway.
still... those are pretty wide brackets.
-Damascene Queen
What I am annoyed by is that these orientalists use the veil to look down at arab and muslim women.
I find it insultive these kind of writers do not look beyond the surface of the veil to the reality of the majority of Arab/Muslim, not just the wealthy middle class, women that suffer due to poverty, institutional sexism from currupt dictators/kings, neolibrealism, war, occupation.
Even the issue of how women in hijab are discriminated or scapegoated is not touched in these kind of writings.
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