Pimping for Powerful Peace

"an Arab man's attempt at bridging the cultural gap. Trying to make a difference. Failing a lot. Succeeding once in a while."

Mahmood Nasser Al-Yousif

CNN posted this article today, here is the first part. For those of you who are concerned about the plight of women in Arab countries, note the numbers of females. (Also that these voices do better in our language than we do.)

I've really enjoyed watching the process of dialog over the past months online. Feels like our founding fathers meeting the world. East and west, men and women, feminists and imams, Shia and sunni. (Interestingly never seen people claiming alliance with the Taliban on Twitter. Which reinforces my opinion about supplying Afghanistan with satellite internet and cheap laptops. )

The process is the same as posting and commenting here,just back and forth, trying to be civil and understand each other. Apologies for misunderstanding or rudeness.In systems theory we used to talk about feedback loops, old words maybe for learning from each other. Check it out~

(CNN) -- Political unrest across the Middle East has increased appetite in the wider world for comment from within the region, and some are turning to bloggers for insider views on the events unfolding on their television screens.

Social media -- including blogging, Twitter and Facebook -- has played an often-crucial role in organizing the protests sweeping the region. But it's not all politics, and blogs about the ups and downs of daily life can offer a fascinating glimpse of real life in the Middle East.

Here, we have drawn up an entirely unscientific list of 10 of the most interesting blogs from the region.The bloggers come from a variety of backgrounds and countries. Our only criteria were that they are based in the region, write mostly in English and have something worth saying.

Politics in Egypt and the wider Arab world
Arabist is popular for its insightful comment on Egyptian politics. Often thought provoking, it's a good place to monitor developments in post-revolution Egypt.

The principal blogger on this site is Issandr El Amrani, a freelance journalist and commentator for several international publications. El Amrani was born in Morocco, and has lived in Cairo, Egypt, since 2000.

I felt that I would rather represent myself instead of having others speak for me.
--Eman Al Nafjan, author of Saudiwoman

The Saudi woman who got tired of reading "expert" opinion on her country, Riyadh-based mother of three and post-graduate student Eman Al Nafjan, 32, set up her blog Saudiwoman as a response to reading non-Arabs and non-Saudis giving expert opinions on life and culture in the kingdom.

She said: "I felt that I would rather represent myself instead of having others speak for me. There was no long-term plan but eventually I became addicted to it. To me it's an outlet and a way to voice my concerns about everything, including Islamophobia, human rights violations and women's movement in Saudi Arabia, and the Palestinian/Israeli conflict."

Saudiwoman was a finalist for Best Asian Blog in the 2011 Bloggies.

Bahrain's "Blogfather" Mahmood Nasser Al-Yousif, the author of Mahmood's Den, is a long-time blogger who has been described as the region's "Blogfather."

Al-Yousif was recently arrested and briefly detained by the Bahraini authorities. He describes his blog as "an Arab man's attempt at bridging the cultural gap. Trying to make a difference. Failing a lot. Succeeding once in a while."

Young Yemeni woman reporting on protests

Afrah Nasser is a 25-year-old journalist at the Yemen Observer. Nasser has been blogging for just over a year, featuring politics, news and views. Her recent posts have been about the protests in Yemen and include updates from Sanaa's Change Square, a focal point for protest in the capital.
She said: "I love to blog about political topics especially since the revo started. It's my gateway to express my views freely. However, that caused me trouble sometimes."
Nasser said she recently received a threatening message on her Facebook account. Her response? She just translated it from Arabic to English and posted it on her blog.

"Rantings" from Egypt

The Rantings of a Sandmonkey was an anonymous blog until its author Mahmoud Salem went public, saying he had been attacked close to Cairo's Tahrir Square during pro-democracy demonstrations in February this year.
Salem said his car was destroyed and he was beaten up by pro-government thugs in the days before the resignation of President Hosni Mubarak.
Sandmonkey has just won the best English language blog -- a people's choice award -- in The Bobs, Deutsche Welle's Blog Awards.


* If you're interested, the Interim Government of Libya has set up a website, very well done. Not exactly AlQuaeda type language. This is from their home page, makes me proud to have lived there.

"In this important historical juncture which Libya is passing through right now, we find ourselves at a turning point with only two solutions. Either we achieve freedom and race to catch up with humanity and world developments, or we are shackled and enslaved under the feet of the tyrant Mu’ammar Gaddafi where we shall live in the midst of history."

How does love get made?

Backtracking on some bloggy friends entries of the past year I found this, a poem by Sharon Olds, "The Knowing." Ever find something you wish you had written yourself? this poem is like that. It cuts right in deep, not one superfluous sound.

Later I was thinking about that term, "making love." I say it or hear it so often I don't remember ever thinking about what it meant. I wondered who the first person was to coin that phrase? How did they come up with that? All of a sudden it struck me as amazing. Creating something like. Not the old fashioned marital manual version of sexual euphemisms. ahem. no, but making a thing that is love.

Love. Is it an emotion? Is it a phenomenon? Is it a commitment? A recognition? Is it something made? or uncovered? discovered? ignored? Love within a sexual relationship, is that different than friendship love? and falling? how is that different from making?


I know my own experience in it, that's all. The last time I was in love was about 7 years ago. We had compatibility in many amazing ways, but he was newly separated when we met. I had a dream shortly after our first lunch meeting. He was with me in my bed, although not physically, but in my dream it was so vivid that I thought he was truly there, and he said, "I love you." and i heard the words ringing in my actual ears. I felt, still do, that the dream meant we had a connection that moved through time and space. It was more than a year before I heard him say that for real.

When he did he said he didn't remember when it started, that he'd loved me for some time. He made me look him in the eyes when he said it.

Sometimes still I wake up in the middle of the night aching for that truth.

But I never felt that we "fell in" love. I just felt happy with him. I have had the experience of falling before. And the experience of comparing other loves to that feeling and believing they weren't enough. The "fall" was what made it real for me at that time. Not now. not since my last love.

I believe that we can fall in love many times and also find many people who are enough to love romantically without that falling thing. now, that's what I believe. and believing it, how does that shape the love we make? there's something here about meaning, the meaning we attribute to these experiences. Probably lots of these things are shaped in us before we can begin to articulate them- cultural norms. But romantic love is a universal theme, cross culture, time and place.

That's all I have for now. Except for this: all this talking about love and theorizing, is it my way of kind of having intimacy without risking actually meeting new people? and risking rejection or some other kind of hurt? maybe I want some vague prince charming to see through my words to my, dare I say it, need. ? someone smart and creative who isn't a drinker/ drugger/ married who could love me with pulling my hair out, unemployed and sleeping in my car while I'm 50 years old? now I remember why i do this. It's a semblance of remembering, maybe. Maybe it's my way of making love.

That's not the only thing I do here, i do really appreciate the whole of you and so many wonderful individuals here who write and think and feel. It's something I just have thought about this week, though.

back to the original ideas.. How about you? how do you think love is made?

Big Guns, revisited

Reposting this, because Libya's celebrating 40 years since the revolution this week.

When I was 8 we moved to Libya. We lived in temporary housing for the first months, downtown in Tripoli. My brother was 6 and my sister three months old. My brother and i were like fric and frac, always the same height, identical coloring, people asked if we were twins regularly. Our birthdays were two years and two weeks apart. The first night in our new home we heard this godawful wailing during what seemed like the middle of the night. Very loud, we were sure the place was haunted and ran into our parents bedroom. They had no idea what the noise was. Turns out our apartment (4rth floor) was right next to a mosque. With loudspeakers, of course, calling to prayer, right at our level.

One day my mom asked us to go to the store for her. It was a few blocks from our apt. So we went, and my brother knocked a bottle of pop onto the floor, where it broke and splashed onto my legs and feet and into my shoes. Ick. I took them off, it was summer, preferring barefoot to sticking shoes. So we're walking along, I'm fairly small, btw, for my age, about the size of my 6yo brother. All of a sudden I feel someone's hand in my underwear, from behind.

It happened so fast it was exactly like that, my first awareness of it was feeling it, this guy had come up from behind me and lifted my dress and put his hand in my pants in one fast move. In the next move I turned to his smirking face and swung those shoes into his head, yelling. He was pretty big, about 12 or 13, and looked shocked. Then took off running across the street into a vacant lot. Another Libyan kid was there and saw the whole thing, he ran after him as I was screaming, in English, for him to get him. They disappeared into an alley and we went home. For the longest time I was afraid I might be pregnant. Seriously. Instead, I got a vaginal staff infection and antibiotics.

months later. One morning i stayed home from school, my brother left for the bus stop as usual. After about five minutes he's back, telling my mother he couldn't go to school because soldiers were shooting at the kids at the bus stop. My mom was pretty incredulous, so he told her to look out the window. I looked with her. He was right. Well, except the shooting was with blanks, after lots of warnings to get inside. That was our introduction to Qaddafi. and his army of 14 year old boys. Some of it's a little fuzzy, but that part is pretty vivid, how young they were. Like they'd been let out of school to play war, they were pumped up, riding around in the back of trucks waving their rifles and machine guns.

Martial law was in place for a while, maybe a week or so, like 12 hour curfew. My smart dad had thought ahead to get a hard core short wave radio to bring with us. We got all our news from BBC in South Africa. That way we knew about the revolution, all of it. It wasn't so bad, better because we were in an apartment building, so we could go back and forth to neighbors and we all shared food and essential stuff. In the end there was only one death, from someone shooting them self accidentally, as i remember.

My next memory is one afternoon going downstairs to the lobby of our building to see a soldier sitting there shooting the shit with the doorman. He had a gun with him. It was as big as I was. Well, that's the way I remember it, anyway. I backed up toward the stairs. At that time I wore glasses. He wanted to look at them, gesturing to me, speaking in Arabic, to take them off and give them to him. That would have meant getting closer to him. The doorman, in English, encouraged me, telling me he wouldn't hurt me. Not convincing. It was very scary, felt like a catch 22. Was he more likely to shoot if I ran away, or if I was closer to him. Was he mad at me already because I didn't give him my glasses right away? I ran, his laughter chasing me up the stairs.