The+role+women+play+in+Shame+and+Dreams+and+Shadows+in+the+Middle+East

[[image:shahbender.jpg]]Ghada Shahbender, Cairo, Egypt [[image:wiki.jpg width="407" height="250" align="right"]]
"I graduated from university, got married, had my first child, then twins, then a fourth child, all in six years. I was convinced that the best I could do was to give these kids a good education, support my husband in his career, work hard at whatever job, and I'd be fulfilling my parental, civic, social, and national duties."

On May 25, 2005, a demonstration group called Kefaya, which means "Enough," demonstrated against a referendum the required impossible requirements from political parties in the national legislature so as to ensure no political opposition to win in the government. The police that day stepped aside and allowed a group of thugs to "grope, beat, maul, and rip the clothes off of the women," (Robin Wright, 68).

"I went home, turned on the television, and was immedately hit with the images from the demonstration. I saw one of the women dragged down the street and clothes pulled off her and onlookers doing nothing. I saw police open barricades to allow the thugs to go in."

Shahbender recounts the reactions made by her children. Her daughter said, "Why do you get so upset? We can't do anything about it. People are harassed every day." And her son said, "Why were the women there anyway?" Her children's reaction truely depict a new generation within Egypt that is more conservative and complacent then the previous generation. Her daughter excepts that brutality as what it is, a part of every day life for women in Egypt, and her son takes the less passive stand and automatically decries the women for being at fault in the situation because they did not belong there.

Two months after the referendum passed, Shahbender and a group of women launched a movement called, "We're Watching You," to monitor Egypt's government and publicized government misdeeds on their website, shayfeencom.com

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Fatima Mernissi, Fez, Morocco


Fatima Mernissi was born in Morocco in 1940 in a harem, which was a term for a mansion for the bourgeoisie. The Harem was contained by the hudud, the high walls that would protect from the frontier. It was a very hiearchial set up with the men who lived in the salon... page 352. The women hardly left the house. Her father told her at a yong age, that the sexes, rightly, had been segregated by God. Harmony required that each geneder respect the prescribed limits of the other. Trespassing would only lead to sorrow.

[|More on Fatima Mernissi]

"But we dreamed of a trespass beyond the gates all the time," she recalls. There was a radio inside for the harem, which belonged to the men, but the women inside accessed it and began to listen to it. "The news became very important to me," Messrini says. Her father discovered this and became angry and so her mother one day told her that "Allah made us all equal," and although her mother was illerate and dependent, she was able to convince her husband to hold a meeting which would inevitably allow Fatima to leave the Harem and obtain an education.

For more information,
[|New York Times Article, "Dreams And Shadows of the Middle East," Robin Wright]

[|Transcripts with Robin Wright in the Washington Post]

[|We Are Watching You]

[|What is a Harem?]