The Blog and the Shower

Sometimes, men don’t like to shake women’s hands. It’s not terribly common, depending on which circles one turns in, but when a man doesn’t want to greet a woman with a handshake, he normally puts his hand over his heart instead of grasping hers, either because of an aversion to touching a strange woman in general, or because he’s recently performed the ritual washings, or wudu’ ( وضوء) that are a prerequisite for prayer: if he then touched a woman before praying, he would have to perform them all over again.

One of my teachers knew a certain man who never liked to shake women’s hands; he always placed his hand over his heart when he saw her. One day, however, he appeared to have changed his mind: not only did he take her hand when he saw her, but he held it for much too long, rubbing her palm with his fingers. The next time she saw him, he attempted to shake her hand again, but she placed it over her heart. “Mitwadi’a (متوضئة),” she said, explaining that she had just performed the ablutions for prayer. She hadn’t really, of course, and the man was flabbergasted that she claimed to be about to pray in ordinary clothes with her hair uncovered (since even women who don’t veil often cover their hair for prayer), but he could hardly insist that she break her state of ritual purity to touch him, and she walked off laughing to herself at having used his own weapon against him.

It rained here yesterday…

…and the slanted street next to my appartment building turned into a river.

I’ve always taken it for granted that the proof of Mohammad having existed as a historical person was much greater than the historical proof for Jesus, for example (which is rather slim), so I was fascinated to read this from the Wall Street Journal, about a German convert to Islam became an Islamic scholar and university professor, then concluded that Mohammad probably did not exist.

I don’t know if he’s right or not.  With my rather basic knowledge of early Islamic sources, it seems a little farfetched to me.  Nonetheless, I applaud the spirit of academic inquiry into the history of Islam, just as I applaud similar research into the history of any subject, belief, or idea.

They other day I sat with a Syrian journalist I know for a while; his English was fantastic, so we spoke mostly in that language about censorship and restrictions and the difficult life of a journalist here. I asked him if he had any interest in writing news articles in English, observing that there was more freedom of expression to be had in foreign languages (as a general rule, the less popular appeal a medium has—such as theater versus television, writing in English versus writing in Arabic—the more leeway it seems to have).

He drew his brows together and looked ponderously into space, as if the idea was wholly unfamiliar. Finally he shook his head. “I’m writing for Syrians,” he said. “If I write in English, the Syrians who will read it will be the people of my class, people who are highly educated and have traveled, people already I know. In that case, I wouldn’t have to write an article if I wanted to tell them something—we could just drink coffee and discuss it in a café.”

A few weeks ago when I got on the microbus to go home from school, I attempted to sit down next to an aging woman in a black abaya carrying two small children on her lap, one of whom was wearing a tiny army uniform. “Are you a boy or a girl?” she abruptly asked me. “A girl,” I said, to giggles from the rest of the passengers—although I wasn’t sure whether they were laughing out of embarrassment for me or for her. It’s not the first time I’ve been mistaken for a boy, although the only other time was in a New York grocery store when I was wearing a bulky jacket and had my shoulder-length hair tucked under a hat, such that an employee to whom I had my back turned called me “sir” as he attempted to squeeze past me in the narrow aisles. I’ve cut my hair since then, and while it’s a somewhat unusual haircut here that I think has saved me from being confused with the stereotypically blond Russian prostitute, this is the first time anyone has baldly asked for my gender, which makes me want to know if many other people have wondered, but not asked. Certainly, women in my neighborhood sometimes stare at me as much as men, but gender is marked grammatically in Arabic, and I’ve yet to hear anyone refer to me as “you (male)” rather than “you (female)”. Strangely, I didn’t feel very embarrassed that the woman on the service was confused by me, not as much as I might have felt if the same thing had happened in America: her accent suggested that she was from the countryside, not Damascus, so she might not have seen many girls with short hair before, and besides, while being a foreign woman means that I carry the burden of all the negative stereotypes that both my expatriate predecessors and the American media have spread about this class of people, it also means that I’m free of some of the expectations and traditions that dog Syrian women. I may not be able to sit spread-legged like a man on public transportation without attracting unwanted attention, but even conservative men exempt me from the expectations they cast onto their daughters. Notions of gender are obviously quite strict in the Middle East (and outside of the hallowed halls of our higher educational institutions, I’d hardly consider gender pliable in America), but being a foreigner removes me, ever so slightly, from this binary.

A New York Times article, “Secret Order Lets U.S. Raid Al Qaeda in Many Countries,” sheds some light on the background to the official justification of the recent U.S. attack on Syria–although not much.

It also raises quite a few questions, as it reports: “Apart from the 2006 raid into Pakistan, the American officials refused to describe in detail what they said had been nearly a dozen previously undisclosed attacks, except to say they had been carried out in Syria, Pakistan and other countries. They made clear that there had been no raids into Iran using that authority, but they suggested that American forces had carried out reconnaissance missions in Iran using other classified directives. [...] The recent raid into Syria was not the first time that Special Operations forces had operated in that country, according to a senior military official and an outside adviser to the Pentagon.  Since the Iraq war began, the official and the outside adviser said, Special Operations forces have several times made cross-border raids aimed at militants and infrastructure aiding the flow of foreign fighters into Iraq.  The raid in late October, however, was much more noticeable than the previous raids, military officials said, which helps explain why it drew a sharp protest from the Syrian government.”

Um, so that means there have been MORE attacks within Syria borders that we never even heard about?  And if the other raids weren’t “noticeable,” then what exactly did they do?