2-16-10 Lubna Hussein | Beyond the Veil Update

1-9-10 What women wear Nesrine Malik The Guardian

11-25-09 French foreign minister praises courage of Sudan’s trouser journalist Sudan Tribune

11-24-09 Lubna Hussein Speaks at Press Confrence with French Minister Bernard Kouchner Anne

11-21-09 Lubna Hussein Slips Into Europe, Asking Muslim Women Across the Middle East to Take a Stand Anne

11-21-09 SHIA Women’s Advocacy Group Calls for End to Lashing in Sudan Anne

11-16-09 Defiant ‘Trouser Lady’ Continues Times Record News

11-13-09 When Women are banned from wearing trousers The Jakarta Post

10-21-09 Lubna Hussein’s Two Arrest Mates Sentenced to 20 Lashes and Fines of 250 pounds

This should be a good event, except that I’m 99% certain that Anne of Carversville is now banned in Iran. I’d like not to be entirely blacklisted in Africa and the Middle East, but my writing is being translated in the Middle East, so I know this could happen. 

We’re making major changes in the website and how we treat the international women’s news, thinking it was a quiet time to do so.

Rather than segregate the topic of international women and oppression, we’ve moving it to Love|Peace and Global Futures, also Philanthropy channels.  We didn’t previously have a Love | Peace channel, but how can one write about the Congo, for example, and disconnect the rape of women from violence in the Congo or from the rest of us buying gold jewelry from the region.

The development issues around women now are in Global Futures. When everything is properly categorized, we will run both the news and a short posts about the longer articles in each channel from Daily News and the corresponding category blogs, listed on the right side column. This is a new feature which will capture every post on a topic from across the website. Often, an article is important in more than one channel, and this new organization allows us to capture the article wherever it’s relevant.

This Lubna Hussein channel is fully intact. I will review what else surrounds it, content-wise. Many private journal essays reflecting on these issues are the thumbnail articles on the right-hand side.

Not knowing why our traffic is so strong on Lubna, let me also refer you to

1) Topics organized with thumbnails and the title of most important articles on Lubna and women in developing countries. It’s 80% updated and good source of information.

http://www.anneofcarversville.com/iwr-topics/

2) My writings on feminism. Unlike so many Americans involved in international women, I’m not representing a religous organization and definitely not trying to convert anyone to my religious point of view. My goal is female empowerment, sharing information and creating context.

http://www.anneofcarversville.com/smart-sensuality-topics/

In working on Lubna’s case and also Chansa Kabwela in Zambia, and in dialogue with many people about sticking my nose into affairs not my own, I’ve reflected on women’s rights in America.

My concerns about America are as great as those for the women of Sudan or India. I believe that the religious patriarchy is fighting back vigorously around the world.

As I wrote this weekend in 21st Century Politics | Religion Rules, the fight for souls is an incredibly underreported story of our world. Concurrent with the fight for souls, is the absolute need to control female sexuality. These themes are all converging in 2010 and the outcome may not be as positive as we hope, even in America, where I expect Roe vs Wade to be overturned.

If you have questions about Lubna or how the Internet can be used to work together on these issues, based on my short, but very dynamic experiences on a few cases, drop me a note in Contact Anne.

via Sudan365.org On 9 January 2010, Sudanese communities and activists around the world are joining together to call on international leaders to take urgent diplomatic action to prevent an escalation of conflict in Sudan that could lead to massive human rights violations

9 January 2010 also marks the fifth anniversary of the Comprehensive Peace Agreement, which signaled the end of the civil war. Millions were killed. Millions were displaced. Millions suffered dire human rights abuses.
And one year on from 9 January 2010 – in 365 days – a referendum is due to be held to determine the future of Sudan. more reading

Lubna Hussein in London November 2009

Her trip was a two-day trip organized by human rights group Sudan Civic Foundation.Salah Bander, head of the foundation, stated that the Sundanese government is more concerned about even a few worlds of bad press publicity out of Sudan than a multi-page expose inside it.

This has been my sense of the situation as well, and is a key reason why it’s important that Lubna keep up her pressure on this issue.

Lubna gave the lecture to more than 200 people at the Horn of Africa community group at London’s Shepherd’s Bush, before returning to France last night. It’s not known whether she will return to Sudan. A

via London Evening Standard

A typidal Khartoum market scene, via Daily Mail UK

In a sequence of events that Lubna Hussein asserts to be the typical process for women in Sudan — the girl’s name and family are public; the family in the case is talking to the press; and the family has hired a lawyer.

The mother of teenager Silva Kashif told Reuters on Friday that she plans to sue the police and judge, who imposed the 50 lashings on her underage, Christian daughter.

Kashif, whose family comes from the south Sudanese town of Yambio, was arrested while walking to the market near her home in the Khartoum suburb of Kalatla last week, her mother Jenty Doro told Reuters.

Bullet points of the case include:

- The girl Silva Kashif was arrested in the market wearing a “normal skirt and blouse, worn by thousands of girls”, according to her lawyer Azhari al-Haj.

- Under the current sharia law, people under 18 should not be given lashes.

- No parents or legal guardian was contacted

- Because of her Christian religion, Kashif is theoretically not subject to Islamic sharia law in Khartoum, per the terms of a 2005 peace deal between north and south.

Middle East Online writes that Hussein has announced that she’s waiting for the network of women’s rights activists in Sudan to decide whether she should return or stay out of the country.

It seems also that Lubna now understands how incredulous many people are over her assertions that 43,000 women were arrested in 2008. Affirming the numbers yet again, Hussein said:

“If that’s happening in Khartoum, we can only imagine what’s going on in the rest of the country,” which is Africa’s largest state and home to 42 million people, she told reporters.

“The law is generally applied to poor women, while better-off women can pay a bribe to get off,” said Lubna, adding that a whip made of hippopotamus leather is sometimes used to administer the lashes. via Middle East Online

Lubna Hussein with former French president Jacques Chirac

Sihem Habchi speaks on behalf of Ingrid Betancourt via Benjamin Lemaire at FlickrAccording to the chairwoman of the French women’s rights group “Ni Putes Ni Soumises” (Neither Whores Nor Submissives), Sihem Habchi, Hussein’s niqab-wearing journey to Paris took her from Sudan on September 18, 2009 and into Sanaa Yemen, Cairo and Amman before she arrived in France.

In each country, Lubna Hussein met with women’s rights activists.

Arriving in Paris on November 18, 2009. Lubna Hussein spoke at a gathering in Paris that evening, organized by NPNS.

According to Deutsche Welle, Lubna joined a NPNS protest with residents in a town east of Paris. The group was supporting a Muslim woman whose husband poured petrol over her, then set her on fire. Anne

France, Paris, June 7, 2008. After that a court allowed a Muslim groom to annul his marriage because he found out on his wedding night that his bride was not a virgin. The association ‘Ni Putes Ni Soumises’ organized a demonstration for the emancipation of women. De L to R : Patrick Gonthier UNSA Education, Laurence Laigo from CFDT, unknown, Dominique Sopo, president de Sos Racisme andt Sihem Habchi presidente de Ni putes Ni soumises.

http://bit.ly/7JEvMY

Lubna Hussein bowed to the fundamentalists of Sudan for one moment, donning a niqab to leave the country.

Hussein asked to travel with papers but was denied the necessary documents. Determined to go to France and also England to promote her new book, Lubna resorted to the niqab as the only means of leaving Sudan.

It’s unclear whether she will be able to return to Sudan after her visit in Europe ends late next week.

Here Lubna meets with France’s Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner.

Lubna Ahmed Hussein is on the road in France, next to England. Hussein slipped out of Sudan with the help of “friends at the airport”, defying her Sudanese travel ban.

Saying that she is willing to die for the struggle of emancipating Muslim women — and acknowledging that she has received death threats since beginning her campaign to stop the flogging and imprisonment of Sudan’s “trouser girls” — Lubna Hussein is turning up the volume and the risk associated with her beliefs. Hussein has single-handedly launched a modern-day crusade to end the “absurdity” of laws that humiliate women in Sudan and elsewhere.

Hussein remembers the flowering of women’s rights in Sudan, as progressive Muslim women sought and achieved enhanced status and freedoms that made Sudan a trailblazer for North African women.

SIHA refers to that trousers case in its paper, titled “Beyond Trousers: The Public Order Regime and the Human Rights of Women and Girls in Sudan.” The public order regime in Sudan is a set of laws and mechanisms which, in addition to dealing with matters of public security, prohibit and enforce a range of behaviour from dancing at private parties, to “indecent dress”, to intention to commit adultery.

The Regional Director of the SIHA Network, Hala Alkarib, said that SIHA is presenting its submission “on behalf of Sudan’s men and women who stood against the Public Order Regime during the ‘trouser case’.” via Sudan Tribune

SIHA website