From: "Andy" <as-AT-spelthorne.ac.uk>
Date: Fri, 26 Feb 1999 11:02:32 +0000
Subject: Re: women in the bible




Andy:

> >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.
> 
Ali:

> 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.

I get this impression underlying now, and our tutors who are Somali 
women certainly come into this category. One of them is a keen 
motor-bike scrambler. But now they all wear the head gear when a male 
is present and do the eye-averting bit. I don't ask too closely what 
the war has done but there seems to have been some' cultural 
retrenchment' over here in Southall.

> 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.. 

I think there is an element of this, and the Imams are naturally all 
Arab trained, mainly from Saudi, but they seem quite a genial crew. 
When I first trained tutors, the Somali men didn't want to be trained 
alongside the Somali women, but a couple of the Imams told them they 
were in England now and not to be so stupid! So I think things will 
eventually revert, except that our climate isn't likely to encourage 
a relaxation of the dress code.

> 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.

They giggle, so I'm sure there's hope. Unfortunately fundamentalist  
Islam as a political ideology, seems to be answering the need for the 
poor in the face of globalisation and western predators.


> *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!!!
> 

I'm in that centre next week. I'll check on their rolling out of rugs 
techniques.


_as