Our Women on the Ground Read online

  Some of these women have been sexually assaulted, threatened, propositioned, detained, or even shot at while on the job, but have persisted nonetheless. They’ve contributed to dispelling the many myths saturating an often basic depiction of the region they have cultural, linguistic, and personal ties to, while fighting patriarchy and sexism. At the same time, they’ve also been able to use gender to their advantage, managing to conduct harrowing interviews with other women precisely because being female has given them access a male reporter would not have been able to secure as easily, if at all. Some have even lost loved ones while on the field.

  What binds them all is the fact that they are unwavering in their pursuit of truth and their desire to disseminate it. That relentlessness is the thread that runs through this book’s pages. The sahafiyat have helped write history. Together, their stories offer a stunningly complex patchwork narrative.

  * * *

  —

  When I learned of Ruqia, I added her name to a long list of journalists covering the Middle East that I’d started compiling in a Google doc titled “Mideast Reporters” in December 2010. I created the document shortly after Tunisian street vendor Mohamed Bouazizi self-immolated, sparking the beginning of what would later be dubbed the Arab Spring. News on the Middle East, already a hotbed for foreign reporters, subsequently imploded. I wanted to keep track of who was reporting what and from where, often following the journalists on Twitter and Facebook and adding their names to my Google Alerts. This “journo-list” endeavor was, in part, because at the time I was a sahafiya writing about the ramifications of the Arab Spring and monitoring regional media for Bloomberg News.

  For as long as I can remember, I had wanted to be a journalist. My fascination with news and the Arab world was born in a small living room in the United Kingdom in the early nineties. My father used to record the BBC’s dispatches from Iraq and Kuwait on VHS during the first Gulf War, in addition to political developments in our home country, Lebanon, which was still reeling from a deadly sectarian conflict and an Israeli invasion. Over the years, his tapes piled up. When I was growing up, my mother and father would nostalgically tell my siblings and me that they missed home, even as images of armed men, injured civilians, and bombed-out buildings covered the TV screen. As phone lines were frequently down in south Lebanon, my parents were rarely able to communicate with their families, whose safety they continually feared for, and they relied on journalists for updates on the calamitous situation.

  Fourteen years later, during my tenure as the editor in chief of my university’s student newspaper in Beirut, I was thrown into reporting on Lebanese politics at a time of unending turmoil. Rafiq al-Hariri, Lebanon’s former prime minister, was assassinated in a massive car bombing by unknown assailants, an event that marked the start of what many called the Cedar Revolution. Its upshots, which included the departure of Syrian troops from the fragile country, altered the course of modern history in Lebanon and perhaps the region. As the newspaper’s editor, it was my duty to commission, write, and edit stories on the student body’s reaction to the assassination and the instability that ensued. Though the newsroom was full of men, some of the most tenacious and determined reporters on my team were women, one of whom—Nour Malas—wrote a piece for this book.

  In January 2010, soon after graduating from Columbia Journalism School, I joined Bloomberg News as a reporter. The move was an unusual one for me: given my background in literature and politics, I wasn’t especially interested in finance. Within twelve months, however, the Arab Spring would erupt, and the position would come to involve reporting on how the financial markets and economies across the Middle East and North Africa were reacting to the upheaval.

  The underpinnings of the Arab Spring were indeed largely economic. But because I was reporting from the air-conditioned skyscrapers of Dubai instead of on the ground in countries including Egypt, Syria, Libya, and Tunisia, I felt like a fraud.

  At one point in June 2011, along with a Syrian stringer, I interviewed the head of Syria’s stock market about his outlook for the year. His country was already on the path toward implosion, but he was choosing to turn a blind eye to the situation—he said he expected several businesses to take an interest in the market, and that the violence would quickly dissipate. That was the moment I reached peak cognitive dissonance.

  My reporting was so far removed from what was unfolding from a humanitarian and political perspective that when Nour Malas casually referred to a “fundie” in a conversation we were having about the uprisings, I’d assumed she meant a fund manager. She was, of course, referring to an Islamic fundamentalist.

  I was certain I belonged on the streets of Cairo and Benghazi, yet there I was, desktop daydreaming in the luxurious halls of the Dubai International Financial Centre. I sat in front of four Bloomberg terminal screens with a skinny latte, a Rolodex of investment banking and trading contacts, and two BlackBerrys close by. (My family was, of course, comfortable with this arrangement. I was in the Middle East, but nowhere near the violence. I was reporting on the Arab Spring without having to speak to rebels or strongmen. And my prospects of marriage to a banker were reasonably high.) In hindsight, I wish I had dropped everything on the spot and rushed to the front lines, but that would have required courage I admittedly did not yet have—courage the women in this anthology exemplify.

  That’s not to say the story of how the Arab Spring eventually touched the oil-drenched gulf wasn’t fascinating to observe from an economic perspective. Countries that had been mostly insulated from protests and considered “safe havens” began to witness dissent, prompting generous handouts, salary increases for state employees, and affordable housing programs from the government to placate activists and dissidents. Though that dissent was almost immediately crushed—in the case of Bahrain, the quashing was of a particularly deadly and violent nature—fear of it potentially breaking out again or of any spillover from neighboring countries continues to influence policy making and economic strategy in some of the world’s most prosperous nations, and to weigh heavily on human rights.

  While at Bloomberg, I was occasionally placed on “Arab Spring monitoring” duty, which quite literally entailed monitoring state-run websites, the pan-Arab news channel Al Arabiya, and other Arabic-language media outlets for breaking news. Initially, we spotlighted the brewing conflict in Syria with a barrage of death-toll headlines. But we soon stopped flashing news on the fatalities: there were simply too many to keep up with.

  To overcompensate for that cushy financial reporting job, I voraciously consumed news on the Arab Spring whenever I had a spare moment, closely following the work of reporters I had quickly come to admire. Many of those journalists are featured in this book. When I added their names to my ever-growing journo-list, it didn’t take long for me to notice the considerable gender and background discrepancy. As the list grew, so, too, did the imbalance. Soon I observed that not only were there more men than women reporting on the region for international media, but most of the reporters were Western. (It’s worth noting that many excellent women reporters of Western origin have been leading Middle East coverage in the past decade or so, particularly that of Syria—including, of course, the indomitable Marie Colvin, who died while covering the siege of Homs.) The gap came as no surprise to me, but to see it in such plain form was a shock nonetheless.

  As this book demonstrates, Arab sahafiyat all over the world are doing incredible and vital reporting during this era of unrest, and they understand the region deeply. In fact, one of the most significant challenges I faced in creating this book was having to cap the number of contributors and conflicts; there are far too many brilliant women reporters whom I reluctantly had to exclude, and, sadly, there are far too many conflicts in the region to include them all. And yet, these women’s voices aren’t heard enough in the global discourse on the Middle East. This absence can be attributed, at least in part, to gender bias. Add to that an Arab
woman writing about the Arab world, and the problem is compounded.

  * * *

  —

  The problem is hardly recent. In the past century, some of the journalists and media activists who have left an indelible mark on the region were women who challenged societal norms and risked their lives as they sought to document and challenge disturbing truths and political developments. But, perhaps unsurprisingly, they are little known, even in the Middle East.

  Nabawiya Musa, a writer, editor, and founding feminist of modern Egypt, devoted her entire career to furthering women’s education and eliminating their exploitation. Born in 1886 in Zagazig, Egypt, she became the first Egyptian woman to complete secondary school exams. Musa passionately believed that most perceived differences between men and women were nothing but social constructs that could be eroded with time, and embarked on a career in writing and education to convey that message. In addition to editing a woman’s magazine and writing for al-Balagh al-Usbu’i, or the Weekly News, she penned a number of seminal articles, including “Women and Work” in 1920.

  Across the Mediterranean some twenty-five years after Musa’s death in 1951, Ghada Salhab, a young Lebanese sahafiya, traveled to the front lines of a ferocious civil war to report on it for a national news magazine. Lebanese women are markedly active in the journalism space, partly because the country has the freest press in the Arab world and is, as a result, a regional media powerhouse relative to its small size. But during that devastating and drawn-out war, which raged from 1975 to 1990, and the Israeli invasion of 1982, few Lebanese women reporters were on the front lines.

  Salhab, originally from Tripoli, the second-largest city in Lebanon, bravely covered violent battles between Christian and Muslim militiamen in Beirut. She also covered culture extensively, wanting to highlight the layers of Lebanese life beyond the front lines. The sahafiya later wrote four volumes in Arabic on the civil war, The Black Box of the Lebanese Disaster, in which she exposed details on the conflict that hadn’t been documented elsewhere. She wrote the books, she once said, so the youth could learn from mistakes of the past.

  (Another one of the trailblazing women who covered the war was the esteemed Nora Boustany, who wrote for the Washington Post and other publications and who currently teaches journalism at the American University of Beirut. Sadly, Boustany was unable to contribute a chapter to this book, but we would be remiss not to note her illustrious career.)

  Musa and Salhab are little known, even in their regions of origin, and yet they helped shape and document twentieth- century Egyptian, Lebanese—and Middle Eastern—history.

  * * *

  —

  My intention in creating this anthology was to help ensure that the voices of the women who are striving to shape and document Arab history now are amplified, and to give them the space to speak for themselves, without projecting themes of women’s issues and patriarchy onto them. The result is a unique combination of memoir, history, politics, cultural criticism, and war reportage.

  In these essays, the sahafiyat confront issues surrounding gender, nationality, tradition, and authenticity. They explore their struggles with conflicting identities, reflect on the unexpected friendships they’ve formed with their sources, or describe the ways in which their job has changed throughout the years of covering a rapidly transforming country. A few of them write about the consequences of being a woman on the field—from experiencing misogyny to the uncomfortable truth of how being a female reporter sometimes helped them secure access to male sources in conservative settings. These journalists, some of whom are Middle Eastern by ancestry but have strong ties to the West due to displacement or other factors,* have played a crucial role in helping to narrow a geographical and cultural gap with the rest of the world by way of their linguistic skills and network of contacts in the Arab world.

  Some of the women are independent journalists or “media activists,” like Ruqia. For them, their work has directly opposed the regimes or movements they report on, and often involves expressing opinions or taking stances, a brand of journalism that would be deemed unacceptable to traditional Western media outlets, most of which mandate high standards of impartiality. Many of the other women work, or have worked, with international media outlets, and have therefore had to contend with that expectation of neutrality despite harboring strong personal views on the conflicts they have reported on.

  To be a sahafiya in the region can entail engaging in some form of defiance against state or nonstate actors—not by choice, but simply by doing one’s job. To be a woman war reporter in this part of the world can sometimes mean you are defying not only the state but also your society, family, and the role you are expected to play within your home.

  A sahafiya is twice burdened. As a Middle Eastern or North African woman in her homeland, she is among some of the most mistreated women in the world when it comes to her basic rights: while there have been improvements, the region continues to rank last globally among eight on the World Economic Forum Gender Gap Index.

  And as a native sahafiya, she is among some of the most repressed reporters in the world. The Middle East and North Africa is the most difficult and dangerous area for journalists to operate in, according to Reporters Without Borders, which has also listed Syria as the second-deadliest country for journalists after Afghanistan.

  A journalistic and historical narrative on the Arab world and the broader Middle East dominated by male or Western talking heads is, simply put, incomplete. Failing to expand that narrative to sufficiently incorporate the voices of Arab and Middle Eastern women in the global media landscape obstructs an inclusive dissemination of ideas about the region. And yet the public needs precisely that diversity of voices to formulate insightful views on the area and its people.

  * * *

  —

  I created this long overdue anthology because it’s a book I desperately wanted to see on bookshelves everywhere, one that brings attention to underreported tales and the women who tell them. Arab and Middle Eastern women aren’t heard enough in this space. But they’re living and breathing the region, reporting on it from the front lines in Sana’a and Mosul and from Riyadh and Cairo—even from their living rooms in Raqqa.

  These are our women on the ground.

  I invite you all to listen to what they have to say. They may surprise you.

  ZAHRA HANKIR

  Remembrances

  The Woman Question

  Hannah Allam

  When I speak before Western audiences about my years covering the war in Iraq as a journalist for McClatchy Newspapers, someone inevitably asks, “What was it like to be a woman over there?”

  “Well, I’ve never been there as a man, so I’m not sure I can compare,” is the clever way some of my friends reply to the same question.

  I remind myself to borrow the line, but I can never quite remember to use it because when I hear the question, I see faces. Ban. Shatha. Sahar. Faten. Huda. Alaa. Jinan. Raghad. I think of the slivers of Iraq that they and many other women showed me, spaces that were off-limits to my male colleagues. Kitchens where meals were prepared without electricity. A bedroom with a mortar crater in the ceiling. A beauty salon that banned political talk so customers could get their hair done in peace. “Ladies’ hours” at the Babylon Hotel swimming pool, where sunshine hit bare skin and the war lurked just over a tall concrete barrier.

  Reporting on Iraq through the eyes of its women was illuminating, but, perhaps more important, it was more representative of the population as a whole. Years of bloodshed had left Iraq with a population that was more than half women, many of them heads of households because their men were dead or missing or exiled. When the “woman question” comes up at public talks, I explain the importance of covering women’s stories by evoking the grisly math of car bombings.

  At the height of the sectarian war, in 2006, car bombings were so commonplace that we stopped reporting
on them unless twenty or more people were killed. For a year I didn’t bother to set my alarm before going to sleep because I knew I’d be awakened every morning by a thunderous boom. It wasn’t unusual to record daily car bomb death tolls of eighty or more. Because the most frequent targets were government and police buildings, the vast majority of the casualties were men.

  Consider those numbers for a moment: eighty dead men meant eighty new widows and dozens of newly fatherless children. Every day. That meant that each week, more than five hundred Iraqi women suddenly became the sole providers for their families, setting their own devastation aside to keep their children fed and housed. They sold their wedding gold to buy bread. They felt like burdens on the extended families who took them in.

  At their most desperate, some women entered into so-called temporary marriages that weren’t intended to last long. Essentially, these marriages were prostitution with a thin religious veneer: men with money to spare would pay the women in exchange for sex, but because the couple was technically “married,” however briefly, the arrangement was deemed legitimate according to some Shi’a Islamic rulings.

  A widow named Nisreen told me her hands shook and her face reddened with shame when she signed a temporary marriage contract in exchange for fifteen dollars a month plus groceries and clothes for her five children.

  “My son calls me a bad woman, a prostitute. My children have no idea I did this for their sake,” Nisreen said.