From: "Ali Kazmi" <alikazm-AT-digicom.net.pk>
Subject: Re: women in the bible
Date: Thu, 25 Feb 1999 00:49:57 +0500



>Similarly with the  Somali refugee women I work with. On the face of
>it with female circumcision, war, rape, pillage and complete covering
>of the face including the eyes, they may look submissive, but there
>certainly are under-currents rumbling there as well. I work at second
>hand  through other Somali women who teach, but after a year or so
>you get to know what's going on. It takes more than a bit of travel
>to be a participant observer.


Hmmm...... Somali women are (were?) certainly not submissive. I never saw a
Somali woman cover her face!!!! In fact, by arab standards their dresses
were shockingly revealing, both arms and one shoulder bare.  Most of the
shop keepers and business owners in Somalia were women. Most property
ownership in Somalia was with women. Women owned the house, the men
married - moved in, divorced - moved out. I am of course talking about the
city dwellers, and not the nomadic tribes, but even in the tribes, sexual
equality was much higher then in other arab countries. The one thing about
the Somalis was their pride, and the women didn't really take any shit from
men.

The operative word of course is "were". I was in Somalia in the early 80's,
when they had a communist dictatorship under Saied Barre, a Russian puppet.
Once they kicked out the Russians and let the west in, the arab maul'vis
weren't far behind, with their "AID" and proper dress codes and behavior. So
I guess that the Somali refugee women you are talking about have had to
depend on the Arabs for assistance and have conformed to their expectations
of "islamic" etiquette to survive - or even worse that the years of troubles
have destroyed the Somali pride and culture and turned them into
mock-arabs - or - damn i am completely depressed and need a smoke but its
been 2 years since I quit..  The first time I saw the milky way, really saw
it, a broad jagged lightning bolt across the sky, was lying on the roof of
an adobe hotel in Barava, after they turned the cinema generator off, not an
electric light for 300 miles around, the moonless tropical sky velvety
black, throbbing with stars - millions of them, and being told Barava's
story, how the people of the town were fair skinned because a portuguese
galleon had been shipwrecked and the sailors settled and feeling light -
relieved of progress and technology - with the town blending into the
grassland on one horizon and the same surf, through which those portugese
sailors waded ashore, crashing on the other.

Damn, Andy, raise a lager and toast the Somalia that was - and its people -
whom I hope still carry within them the seeds of who they were. I hope these
refugees aren't a representative sample.

*grin* ask them about Cleopatra's origins, and if they claim she had to be
Somali, because where else could such a timeless beauty come from? then
there is still hope!!!

ali