Najah Alosaimi | Arab News  

FINAL CHECK: A student applying for scholarship checks her documents. (AN photo)               

RIYADH: Manal Al-Quais, a 23-year-old Saudi, won a scholarship from the King Abdullah Scholarship Program to study nursing in Canada. There’s only one problem: She can’t find a close male relative to go with her for the entire duration of the study; they have their own families and responsibilities to attend to.

Recently, two key governmental departments have initiated a debate on how women in Manal’s situation can take advantage of Saudi Arabia’s national scholarship program.

The Higher Education Ministry will not lift the requirement that these students bring a guardian (a close male relative or husband) in order to study abroad, while the governmental Human Rights Commission (HRC) disagrees on the importance of the “mahram” accompanying the students.

“This would help hundreds of women who don’t have male guardians available or ready to go with them to pursue higher education outside,” said HRC spokesman Zuhair Al-Harithy.

In a recommendation sent to the Council of Ministers, the HRC argues that the permission of a guardian should suffice, just as it is done for allowing women to travel unaccompanied.

But for the time being, Higher Education Ministry will stick to the existing policy. Saudi women who go abroad to study at their own expense are exempt from this requirement.

“Any woman student whose guardian leaves the country where she studies will immediately lose financial support,” said Abdullah Al-Moussa, general supervisor of scholarships at the Ministry of Higher Education.

Some guardians prefer to accompany their relatives for a couple of months and return to work and family. And some Saudi women, like Maram, who in her late teens dreams of going to college abroad to study events management, simply do not have any close male relatives.

“The rule expects that every house has a man,” Maram told Arab News, adding that the rules don’t allow her mother to accompany her.

The way the government ensures that Saudi women receiving these scholarships follow the requirements is simple: They don’t give the allowance money to the woman, but rather directly to the guardian whose passport is submitted along with the prospective student during the application process.

“The complaints (on the policy of requiring “mahrams” to accompany these young women) also come from parents,” said Al-Harithy. “They object to the rules that prevent their daughters from studying abroad when they have given their full approval for them to do so.”

Contrary to a popular misconception, women in Saudi Arabia are allowed to travel abroad alone (or without their male relatives) if their guardians give permission. The permission slips are affixed to the passports to show to the authorities.

Al-Harithy pointed out that the HRC efforts in this regard are not only because of individual complaints, but also because of the impact of this rule on society and the economy.

With approximately 30 percent of these scholarships going to women, according to official figures, there are many families with college-bound daughters who can’t afford to send a male relative with them, or the male relatives have their own lives and responsibilities that prevent them from being able to take this time off.

According to media reports, the problem has even led some women to seek out marriages of convenience with men willing to become “temporary husbands” and therefore guardians of these women during their stay abroad.

Sociologist Wafa’a Taibah, a professor at King Saud University and HRC member, expressed concern about these short-term marriages. “Such marriages are based on selfish interests,” she said. “They raise the rate of divorce and adversely affect any children born out of these marriages.”

The guardians themselves are affected. Should they decide to accompany their women relatives, they can end up spending years outside the work force and return to Saudi Arabia jobless.

Abdullah, 31, who did not want to provide his family name, is an example. He works in a legal office, but will soon resign to go to Brisbane, Australia, to act as his sister’s guardian while she earns her Ph.D.

“I will have to resign from my work because the management refused to give me three years’ leave,” he said.

Furthermore, in many cases these men will not be able to legally work in the countries where they reside temporarily. Guardians abroad receive monthly allowances from the ministry for staying with their student relatives.

In some countries, such as the United States and Britain, the guardians receive monthly stipends of SR4,000.

Wajeha Al-Huwaider, a Saudi women’s rights activist, said this policy should change and that there is no legitimate religious basis for prohibiting women from living alone in general.

“If we look around us we will find a number of Saudi women living alone with their kids after divorce, or after their husbands pass away,” she said. “Tribal customs and traditions must not interfere in education because it will slow women empowerment.”

I see people now as strange. If this is heaven, which kind of heaven am I in? Because I ran away from heaven. I ran away from my life.

Let me ask you, in your country, the person when he died in the street, nobody cared about him? In your country, the people die because they carry a hundred dollars? In your country, a person is killed because you have a good car? Or because you are a manager? A doctor? Or because you are happy? Happy in your life? In my country, you don’t know who your friend is; you don’t know who your enemy is. You walk in the street and you don’t know what time you will die and for what reason? Every morning we start our day, we go to work and we say goodbye to our family and we leave the house and they are sure, the family is sure that you may not come back. And so they say «be careful». Everyday they remind you to be careful. The problem is you don’t know - be careful from what? Your friend is dead. One call and your friend is dead. Is this possible in your country? Your friend is dead, your cousin is kidnapped, and they say you or your neighbor is a spy. Your friend is dead. For me this day is finished. Do you know the first time I heard my friend, a friend is dead? How many times alone, I stayed alone? I try to forget, the people around me say this is normal, people here die everyday. But there is a first time, a first friend and for me this is the first person I know he is dead. It takes me three days, after three days, I come back to the life again. I come back to the life because my area has been attacked. The area where I work and live has been attacked. I want to see, to see what happened, I go to work to see what happened to the people I know. To the people I knew. No day is the same from the other.

They took Ahmed today. I watched, he cried, I stood and watched. I stood against my car and I watched. People come and go and I don’t know what to do. Maybe they think I know him, this is dangerous, but for me he is a normal person. I don’t know why they took him. I’m just looking. I want to hear something, some reason. I keep looking at his store - they come out, men with guns - he’s a man and they carry him like a baby. They throw him like a plastic bag into their car.

He cries to anyone who will listen, but no one listens. His eyes are locked onto me. I don’t know how much time passes. Time is not important. They took Ahmed today. The day finished, the next day, they find him, they find the body of Ahmed in the morgue. Ahmed was 25 years old, not married. He worked in the market to make good money, to marry; he had a dream to have a house, a family. For three days, the market is quiet; nobody has a mind to work because we don’t know who is next. That’s what happened one time.

Freedom, we cannot change any letter from this word. Now I sleep with­out fear, now I sleep like a normal person. I’m not scared, no one will come and break my door to steal from me or kill me with my family for no reason. The police won’t come to catch me or my neighbor to gather us together, to question you or to take you. So I can sleep. I close the door and I take off my clothes, and I sleep naked. I smile because I feel light. It’s a nice feeling, I didn’t feel it before.

I stand in front of a red brick immigration building in Stockholm, Swe­den. I’m wearing all of the clothes that I brought to heaven, I shaved. What do I tell them? Who am I? What will happen to me when I go inside this building? Who will I be? Or what, to them?

I know my truth, but how many times have they heard the truth from thousands before me and not believed them. What truth are they looking for? All I know to be true is that my life was no life but I am not alone in this.

I follow a woman from immigration to a storage closet of mattresses, blankets, pillows, some clothes (second hand), shoes, she hands me a blanket and pillow and a blue plastic bag. I still have this blue plastic bag. Somewhere under a bed you’ll find this bag, it’s the first sign, first mark that we are refugees, that we are strangers. I don’t know why no one throws it away, they keep it, it’s a memory, a first memory of living outside of your country. Something changed, my life changed when I accepted this blue plastic bag.

We Iraqis, we are foreigners in our own country and now we are foreign­ers in exile.

In my room in the refugee camp there is Hussein who is a Kurd from Baghdad, who refuses to say he’s Kurdish, he says, «I’m Arab». To the Swedish, he’s an Arab. Hussein cannot speak Kurdish well and his ac­cent in Arabic is not good either. If he speaks with Arabs, they think he’s Kurdish and if he speaks with the Kurdish, they think he’s an Arab. He lost who he was somewhere along the road to Sweden, maybe we all have.

In Iraq you can’t save yourself, you can’t save your son, so you send them away. You cannot save your child. In my own family, my cousin’s 12 year-old daughter slept alongside her parents, on the roof one unbear­ably hot summer night to escape the heat of Baghdad. There was no elec­tricity, no air downstairs so the family slept on the roof. In the summer, you sleep on the roof or in the garden. This is what we do. On this night, a bullet came from the sky and found a place to settle deep inside her skull. The little girl made a sound, they say like a cat and the family woke. They woke to check on her and this sound. Blood stained her face. She made no more sounds. Her family carried her down the stairs to the car and drove to the nearest hospital. At first, they thought the blood was coming from her nose, they didn’t know at first that there is a bullet in her head. At the hospital, her head was shaved and they find a hole in her head. She died within two hours. Before one day, she told her mother, «If I die, give the people Pepsi and bananas». During the three days of mourning, our tradition in Iraq, we make lunch and dinner for the people. During these three days, food was prepared and her mother served Pepsi and bananas. Why she died, we don’t know. A bullet came from the sky.

Do you know loss? Loss that takes everything, every sense is assaulted, everyone is a victim, do we ask to be victims? No, we ask for our lives. It’s no simple matter to leave your country, to leave your life, your family and friends. We are Iraqis, we are proud of being Iraqi, we don’t leave our families, we don’t give our families to stay alone without us. Now, if we stay, our families are more in danger, more in danger if we stay than if we run away. This is how we keep them safe.

In your country, are the police kidnappers and kidnapper’s police? In your country, when you see a man in a police uniform, driving a police car and there’s a checkpoint, a police checkpoint and you stop, you stop for the police does it ever occur to you that you’ll be kidnapped? That the police aren’t the police, aren’t who you believe they are? That the police in your country, are the kidnap- pers, aren’t who you think they are, will never be who you think they are, never to you, never again? You’ll never trust a uniform, never trust your neighbor, never trust your country, that it will keep you safe, know that it can’t keep you safe. Where do you go from there, knowing this? Living this? Where do you begin again, can you begin again, can you trust again or will it be in the back of your mind? For how long? When will we have back our country? Our lives? Our families?

At some point, we all run, you too would run. Maybe you would run before the troubles, or after they’ve broken, your body or you learn to live in fear and you wait. You wait inside your home behind locked doors and drawn curtains and dim candlelight, you wait in the heat, a murderous heat. You listen to each sound outside your door, each whisper can throw you in panic. We spend a lot of time learning our sounds, we memorize sounds. The sound that the front door makes or a car door, how one drags their feet or searches for their keys. We know the sounds of our own footsteps, how each one approaches the home. The women of the house know these footsteps. Your never late to come home. If your late they watch the door for some sign they recognize pulled from the endless days they wait by the door. Then they cry, they cry because they know you won’t be coming home. Our women they know these things. Hold these images. But now do you understand, now do you begin to see, there is no safe side, no one is who they say they are. Once we were normal. Remember, once we were normal. I too was normal, I’m not sure anymore.

I’m from Baghdad, I was. I believe in the Holy Koran, which says, If you don’t feel or you don’t find your life in this ground go to search for your life on another ground. When your country doesn’t want you anymore, why should you want her? In my country, I saw death too many times to face her again. I faced my own death as I lay bound hand and foot in the truck of a car. I was scared, I tell you, I’m still scared. So, I ran.

April 28, 2007. I was kidnapped today. Eat. Sleep. Wait. This is my life, my new life. I watch others watch TV. I watch others watch me. The television sits in the middle of the apartment. It’s always on. We stopped talking with one another, the television speaks between us. It speaks for us. We watch the news of Iraq as if we are in a theatre, an audience sitting quietly with no attachment to what they see before them. Life in a camp, a refugee camp is boring. There is money, but not enough to do more than feed you. We receive money every month. In another country, the money would go farther. In another country, one could go farther. But here in Sweden, I live in a country, which for Europeans is expensive but what about for a refugee? I cannot take a bus to the next town less than 30 kilo- metres away, it is too expensive to travel. I cannot buy bread in the local supermarket, it’s too expensive. So, we bake our bread and we smoke cigarettes from an Arabic shop nearby where a pack is less than half the money than in a Swedish store. I am not complaining, I have no right to complain. I only wonder, what life will I find here in a country that is too expensive for Europeans and impossibly expensive for me and others like me. You see, the last four months, I have not moved from within a one kilometre circle and I have walked this same circle daily, to change the air I breathe. But the Swedish do not speak to us, they have seen enough of us pass through their small town. The others have been here longer than I. The others eyes are out of focus, they stopped going to Swedish classes long ago, they never go outside except once a month to a local disco where they stand on the edge of the dance floor and look at the blonde haired Swedish girls who they know will never speak with them. You learn this quick here that if you have black hair, the locals do not talk with you, it is that simple. Everything’s simple really, black and white. We are black, they are white, our hair is black, theirs is white.

Imagine I’ve come from a prison and now I’ve found that I didn’t escape the prison, I’ve only moved into another room in the prison without my knowing it at first. Each day, my mind narrows, each day I watch the others around me and see their blank faces, they lost their expression months ago; they have been here to long. Here too long without family, without something familiar to hold to, it’s become too expensive to call home to Iraq, we lose a lot of money on the telephone. We lose a lot on the telephone. Boredom deadens you; it has deadened those around me.

I am sure one day it will deaden me. Everything is strange to me here, everything. Every street, the language, the people how they look and act, how they react to me. I see people now as strange.

Where do I begin? Every time I face the West, I find myself facing my own self ... upon my first encounter with Western literature as a teenager, I created a heroine who lived in a cor­ner of my soul, a heroine who was a collage of all the heroines I had met upon the pages of books, with unique characteristics from all the female protagonists from the Western novels I read. I don’t know when I made her, nor where, nor why, but she contained all the coincidental mistakes, games and fears of an adolescent who dreamt of a far-away, unattainable world. I don’t know why my mind has not glazed over the details, and on winter nights in Berlin a month ago, the thought would cross my shivering mind that I was going to meet her, perhaps in a dark bar, or a nearby restaurant, or even at a café, and in the dim lights I would feel the fantasy transformed into a cold, cruel, loneliness, and feel that a childish entertainment that had popped up in my imagination while I read had transfor­med my life into something of a sorry mess, exiling my great hopes into nothingness, not because I will never find that woman, but because I haven’t found the place where I wanted her to be.

This woman is more responsible for my upbringing than the environment I grew up in. She is the one who’s always watching me and critiquing my behavior, and I see her at all times standing in front of me picking out my clothes, helping to brush my hair and making me into someone different. This difference, perhaps this difference alone, has led me to feel this oppressive misery, and to escape from many of the questions that confront me about my own identity.

This is not because my behavior, life or thoughts developed in an environment totally different from the one I found myself in, and belong to the long-lasting hours of reading and dreams rather than the reali­ty that I existed in, but it’s that I found myself after a while participating in creating a history that exi­sted despite my wishes, having to belong to a society where I was already a stranger and an exile. I had dreamt of a place that would change and become one of the most civilized and developed of the world’s metropolises, stable and unchanging, and I find myself here in this place that is constantly agitated, and I must carry a weapon, be a soldier and fight, I must be a part of a society that I was always escaping from into books, hours of reading and dreaming of a woman who was simultaneously there and not there.

Baghdad collapsed a long time ago, ceasing to be a global center, but its wounded narcissism caused this country to create perceptions of itself that far transcended reality. This desolate place, which used to be a center of a world that stretched all the way to the Great Wall of China, has succeeded in attracting the world’s attention once again. The fact that it has found itself in a position that doesn’t match with its historical role has created an adolescent who breaks plates just to gain others’ sym­pathy, and made him stray on the streets committing destructive acts. This is perhaps one way to see this unceasing movement, this constantly moving soul that rushes through Iraqis at a dizzying speed: it is a kind of feeling of being in the wrong place, a feeling of the collapse of an old empire and the sorrow resulting from great poverty and destruction. I was looking out from the river onto this city that is rotting in its darkness and gardens and buildings fading from dirt and rust and filth, thinking to myself again and again how unfair it was for me to be in this place, and to live in this corner of the world, in this patch that breathes destruction and is being destroyed by its sadness and feelings of marginalization, insisting on remaining buried under the ashes. I wondered about this fate that never changes, about this fate that makes me be like this in this place, feeling just a little angry and rather worried when I read, shuddering, about incredibly beautiful and wealthy capitals, or about Baghdad when it was the unmatched metropolis of the world beaming its rays of science and literature across the world, unstoppable.

A real mental confusion has occurred in Iraq as the result of the revolutions, hesitations, break-ups, and splits. It is the desperation of a murderer who no longer has any hope of receiving a logical trial, since politics is the only yardstick; an option of resentment, cruelty and hatred that has imposed degenerate values upon a society that no longer distinguishes between the ethics of politicians or gangs. It has imposed breakdowns and unending abuse as well as confrontations ruled by nothing except the deification of chaos, irrationality and perversity. It has imposed an incredible reverence for the forces of instinct and mysterious blood. Saddam Hussein was a my­sterious current toyed with by the spirit of revenge and violence and brilliant cunning, and his insanity could only be materialized through the picture of the eternal enemy, first the commu­nists, then the Iranians and after that, the Westerners. Iraq as an existing nation and entity was only defined through its enemies, which is how he changed it into a vessel that moved without caring where it was going, a blind force that rolled about aimlessly before collapsing into the abyss of certain destruction, a force of insane speed. The west was pushing it into battle after bat­tle, from invasion to invasion, in order to create the empire of malice and opportunistic masses who would go on to eat up the nation, the nation, the future and the past, leading to this massive distortion of reason, this madness, and unlimited violence and ceaseless, unstoppable, motion.

Life became, not recently, but a long time ago, rather Dostoyevskian in its harshness, reminding me of an event that has remained in my mind from a while back whenever I see the scenes of terror, damage and destruction in Baghdad: Saddam Hussein mentioned three times that he had read Dostoyevsky as a young man, claiming that he had read him while spending time in prison in the 1960s. I didn’t know then whether or not Saddam Hussein had loved Dostoyevsky’s characters and spaces. The only time I saw him was when I was awarded the badge of courage following the Basra battles against the Iranians. Fate alone allowed me to see him up there, his tanned face infused with a specific shade of yellow. I was not a hero, and was more interested in the enormous bookshelf behind him than in the person himself. The shelf was stacked with numerous magazines, and my eyes kept returning to an expensive red leather-bound volume until I made out with some difficulty the name Dostoyevsky on the spine. The name was a key, and after the ceremony, I went to the Semiramis Bar on Sa’adoun street with a friend of mine for a beer and a chat, and there I wondered whether Saddam Hussein was so passionate about Dostoyevsky’s characters that he wanted to create fates for the Iraqi people si­milar to those of the great Russian author, this brutality mixed with a special tinge of cruelty, and an attraction to everything violent and crazy which gave the Iraqis the same excessive emotional range as Dostoyevsky’s characters. An unbounded propensity for extreme hatred, and love that leads them to dumb submission. Upon following it, one finds a resemblance between the narrative of Saddam and his victims and Dostoyevsky’s plots, he leaves them to their own choices, submitting them to humiliation and insults in utter sadism and cruelty, sparing them only to be able to chase them down again later, or else exterminating them ruthlessly only to cry passionately over them afterwards. Even as Saddam stood at the gallows a few months back, I recalled the scene that Dostoyevsky had written of his fake execution.

I stood there, unable to explain this extremism of rancor, malice and hatred, sometimes unable to explain this terrible cruelty without finding it in the past, or in the Islamic heritage of state-formation. But this extremism is also present in the Western nation-state model, and modern Iraqi culture was very much influenced by Western culture... It is true that there was a tangible slide into an Islamic-influenced state with the rise in ethnocentrism, sectarianism and tribalism which stunted social-class formation and led to the creation of power legacies and a regime which used the military as a crutch and distributed rank and privilege to its entourage, but the Western model was always present for in­tellectuals, politicians, the educated elite, artisans and the Baghdad middle classes; thus you find that politicians attempted to emulate western models of forced integration, such as the Bismarck model, and intellectuals tried to imitate Western cultural models in all their phases. The Bismarck model’s failure to produce a nation was doubly painful for Iraqi intellectuals; on one side, there were constant accusations of betrayal of their nation and on the other there was a particularly strong attraction to Western culture dictated by the historical position of the West and its culture. You are aware that the first conception of an intellectual was developed in Baghdad during the Abbasid reign, a model that the West only developed in the modern period. However, Islam in its imperial context proved incapa­ble of melding the philosopher-intellectual, poet, author, historian and critic with the man of the cloth, as happened during the Christian era in the west. Thus, the intellectual was doubly confronted caught between the preacher on one end and the sultan on the other.

Allow me to tell you about Bab Touma, the neighborhood I currently live in, in Damascus: Bab Touma is the Christian area of old Damascus, characterized by the ancient architecture of its buil­dings, its smells and its way of life. It is my favorite place in this area, and this isn’t due to the fact that my home looks like an ancient Roman convent, or to the fact that the place is Christian in an Eastern way. No, it’s - maybe - because it’s crowded with Europeans… Europeans enchanted by the East, as you described them in your letter. You can see them wandering around with their backpacks, wearing simple clothes, walking the streets day and night. This is a neighborhood of narrow, winding streets that intertwine; there are no straight roads, all the roads fold in upon each other in strange ways. These Europeans walk around these narrow winding streets as if they’re looking for something that they can’t find. They roam these labyrinthine streets constantly, and when they get tired they sit in one of the small bars that dot the place, bars that have no equal, since they are a bizarre mix of rowdy Eastern bars and dark European ones. To me, the thing that makes this neighborhood magical are those peo­ple who rent out small rooms in houses with large inner courtyards and fountains: Christian Syrians, refugee Iraqi artists, and Europeans who have come here to search for parts of themselves that they still have not discovered.

We Iraqi artists here in Damascus seek out Westerners naturally, and this is crucial - Easterners love Westerners more than the West, whereas Westerners prefer the East to Easterners. I said this to a Fren­ch friend of mine, who had asked me frankly why Arabs flocked to Pigale, Paris’ red-light district. As I drummed my fingers upon the table, I told her that Westerners like the East as a place, as desert, water, architecture, and ruins, wanting to forcibly remove the people who inhabit it. Westerners come to these places - I’m not saying “our” places - and don’t even glance at the people there. They stare impassively at the places where people live and at the people themselves with blank faces that become animated as they look at stones and ruins. They look to the left at an old building, and turn their heads right to look at another one, and erase those who inhabit them from their vision; or, they take folkloric pictures of these people - but these pictures are cold, sterile and ancient. On the other hand, Easterners are fascinated by Westerners, and because they can’t get to them personally, they take the easy route and interact with the West through Western women, which is why they crowd Pigale!

I am sure that those who come from Europe to Bab Touma are not after our oil, or seeking to oc­cupy our land - the our here is important, since we are talking about us and them. I don’t believe that people in general believe that they really own things on earth. The our and theirs is important as long as Europeans speak of culture and say our culture, and speak of modernity and say our mo­dernity. Even if we only witnessed Western modernity at the end of the 19th century as the Ottoman Empire weakened, you should know that the struggle over moderni­ty was bitter; brilliant intellectuals paid heavy tolls for it. An enthusiastic elite fought for what they saw as dignity and life, and were dragged into a bloody fight with the religious establishment and the political authorities. Some went to the gallows for this, feeling that a true enlightenment was coming from the West. But they were shocked by the second-rate treat­ment they received at the hands of Westerners, and the humiliation they were forced to bear. Did you know that the bloodiest revolt against colo­nialism in Iraq was not over petrol, but over dignity - the 1920 revolt in Iraq against the English, the largest in the colonies, took place because a British officer had slapped an Iraqi man held in high esteem by his family. I have never felt that I own something on this earth. What makes me oppose the West is not the petrol that we don’t own, and not the land that we don’t own either, but disappointment. The Iraqi intellectual is like the intellectual in your countries, feeling that culture has a role to play. Western culture, from Gramsci to Sartre, is planted in the heart of every Iraqi intellectual, and intellectuals here use the same discourse as intellectuals there: semio­tics, sign, image, simulacrum. Western culture is a treasure trove of ideas that intellectuals here plumb ceaselessly. Our intellectuals have entered a new era with the West, don’t think that the majority of them are still looking for something in Western culture: they know full well that the anthologies of the past have collapsed, and are gone for good, and that the return to re­ligion, or the Islamic awakening as you in Western newspapers call it, was caused by the West itself, which has really brought us up against a wall.

The Islamic movements in Iraq were supported, and sometimes even crea­ted, by the West to fight communism, and this has led to us being massacred with their swords these days. We paid a really hefty price because the West doesn’t want any genuine intellectuals in Iraq, and did not respect those who hungered for the spirit of independence, freedom and justice, since these values and principles did not coincide with interests of large corpo­rations. We were being shoved towards the West, which - as we imagined - was the source of reason and enlightenment, and these great humani­stic values naturally stoked our enthusiasm. But the Western support for Islamist movements, reactionary regimes and foul dictatorships gave our consciousnesses multiple personality disorder. Was the continent of reason - which is what we called Europe at the time - truly reasonable? We shouted as loudly as we could: Faust! Faust!

We were famished for the Faustian values, wanting to free our societies of the Holy and we wanted to liberate our societies with Justice and Law. But, on the other end, we came up against the Western wall, which was supporting all those movements that glorified the blood instinct, which murdered us with Western weapons. Our societies are experiencing so­mething akin to the terrifying explosion of the forgotten vows of history, and those of us who had lived a sort of cultural hybridity in Baghdad, due to the intermingling cultures and meanings, now have all developed multiple identities. And, what a disappointment it was when we found the continent of reason treating us despotically with extreme bigotry, showing only one face to us: either Saddam Hussein and stories of him blotting out an entire nation or the news of Islamists, who have become the true representatives of Iraq’s people, with their immensely rich and diverse culture. We - this latest generation of Iraqi intellectuals - realized after it was too late that the West does not want real intellectuals from this country, but what it really wants are servants and shoeshine boys. The war here, is a war of values, and as you see religion is invading Iraq, but don’t believe that Iraqis believe in absolute Truth. This is more a search for objective parameters to balance their lives, since some of the magic of the world they used to inhabit has gone. Iraqi intellectuals were sturdier, due to their sturdy relationships with their culture, but their relationship to Western culture distanced the magic of their culture and their surroundings. And this is why you can see, despite his high culture, the Iraqi intellectual has begun to suffer from a spiritual void. He lives in two separate minds, his present mind deprived of modernity and his other mind that is issued from the modern world - and, I wonder, how can this void be filled? Gilles Keppel’s statement that all Islamists want to get re­venge for their gods does not apply to them at all, but I believe that some of them - at least, some of the intellectuals I know - do not want to stand midway. In the beginning, there was a strong trend towards modernity, or a certain idiosyncratic type of modernity, and when they hit the Western wall, some decided to return to religion in its most primal form, which is impossible, since the world has totally changed. I am certain that they will soon come around.

Under-age and trafficked out of Iraq, girls as young as 11 and 12 are sold as dancers in nightclubs and casinos, virgin brides and as prostitutes to the illegal sex markets in The Gulf, Yemen, Jordan and Syria. Organized criminal networks operating in the sex trade further jeopardize the precarious financial state of Iraqis at home and living abroad.

When the body of her sister was dumped at the door of her Baghdad home, the life of Aishiq, changed forever. It was 2003, she was 12.

Prior to the war in Iraq, she lived with her mother, sister, and brother. The family lived in a simple two-room traditional Arabic style home in the eastern part of Baghdad. Her father died two years prior from natural causes. The loss of the head of household dealt an emotional & financial blow to the family. The future now uncertain, their home falling into disrepair, the remaining members of this small Shiite family moved from their Baghdad home to a $200 a month rental apartment in the holy city of Kerbala. Aishiq’s brother first found work as a day laborer in Kerbala and the family relied on the charity of Shiite and Sunni neighbors for any essentials not covered by the boy’s income. «After the death of my father we were very poor and even with my brother’s money it was not enough. We spent a lot of time without good food. My sister suffered from bad headaches, my mother begged neighbors to feed us.» Financial struggles and stress complicated the mother’s health, dying one day of heart failure while praying in the Imam Hussein Ibn Ali’s mosque in Kerbala. The three siblings, without parents, managed to survive on the sole income of the son. With the aftermath of the war in Iraq, Aishiq’s brother found new work. It is one of the most dangerous civilian jobs in one of the world’s most dangerous countries: translating Arabic for the U.S. military in Iraq. Late one night, Aishiq found the body of her brother, shot in the chest, slumped against the door of their family home, murdered by Wahabeen (foreigners). «There was a noise at the door, I opened it and found my brother shot in his chest. His eyes were open, I closed them.»

Her sister would shortly suffer a similar fate. First beaten, raped, then murdered, the body dumped at the family door, this time by five local men. She was 15 years old. «They kidnapped her in front of our house. My sister told me she was going to study. She was at the front door and five guys came and took my sister - her voice starts to break. She knew the men who killed her sister - these guys take pills.» Scared for her life, Aishiq fled her family home to an uncle living in the same city. Yet, her uncle’s wife refused to take the girl into their home. Without family, a home to return to and her own life endangered Aishiq joined a multitude of Shi’a pilgrims congregating outside of the Imam Hussein Ibn Ali mosque in Kerbala. It was the first night of Ashura, the anniversary of the martyrdom of Imam Hussein, a time of mourning and religious observation for Shi’a Muslims. Exhausted and with few options before her, she lay down on the pavement alongside the mosque and fell asleep. She wouldon’t remain asleep for long. A woman shook her awake, «Aren’t you the daughter of Umm Saddam? Aren’t you Aishiq?» The girl nodded, yes. Kissing both her cheeks, she told her «come home with me.» In the women’s home were two young Iraqi girls orphaned in the aftermath of the war. They told Aishiq that they were living in a Baghdad orphanage when this same woman and a man posed as prospective parents looking for children to adopt. Aishiq explains, «If someone goes there (to the orphanage) and says my wife doesn’t bring children they will give the child. They don’t know how the children will be used.» She is visibly saddened when remembering the two young girls, she describes as thin, one with green eyes, the other with hazel. They girls 11 and 12 years old at the time. The threesome would soon be trafficked out of Iraq. Aishiq sent to work as a dancer in a Dubai nightclub and the two girls would be married off to men in the United Arab Emirates. In the coming months Aishiq would be brought in and out of Dubai three times on trips to and from Syria where the woman’s family was living on the outskirts of Damascus in Sitt al Zeinab. On the return trips to Syria, she worked as a dancer in nightclubs and casinos as she did in Dubai. «There were a lot of girls - But she says she was the youngest - The others were older 16, 17, 18, 20…»

This work did not last long, however as these places are regularly checked by the Syrian police for girls working under the age of 18. The woman who first trafficked her out of Iraq and would today be the go between for prostituting Aishiq decided to sell her most valuable commodity: the girl’s virginity. Living in Damascus, an elderly Saudi man entered into a temporary contract marriage with the young girl. Contract marriages, also commonly called pleasure marriages are permitted in Shiite society but there are conditions: «The girl must be an adult, must have agreement of the mother and father, and cannot be a virgin must be a widow, it must be because of war or other things like that.» The woman sold her off to the Saudi. The man paid 200,000 Syrian pounds (4,000 USD), the going price for a virgin. «When I married I had no period, I was 12. I was a virgin.» The Saudi gave her gold bracelets and earrings, she says he took good care of her and she became fond of him. Yet, it wasn’t long after the woman had the money for Aishiq in hand that she calculated how to get the girl back under her own roof. One day while shopping in a local market in Damascus, two of the women’s sons kidnapped Aishiq. «They put their hands over my mouth and forced me into a car» she says.

After the kidnapping, a doctor was brought to repair the girl’s virginity by reattaching her hymen. «I was crying, it hurt too much - she says. Aishiq goes on to explain that - men want virgins.» Following her kidnapping, she was once again whisked away to Dubai alongside of the woman. The girl was put to work as a dancer once again in a casino. While working she met a young Emirati man, she says they fell in love. The woman again arranged for a contract marriage between the Emirati and the girl. Aishiq lived with this man for 3 or 4 months. Yet, it wasn’t long before the woman who contracted this second marriage again soon realized that if she lost the girl, she also lost income. The woman threatened the young man that if he didn’t return the girl she would call his family in the Emirates. The shame and dishonor would be too great to bear, he agreed to return Aishiq. The young girl was sent back to Syria and forced this time into prostitution In Syria, she lives with the woman who first trafficked her out of Iraq, the women’s two daughters both prostitutes, one of the woman’s sons and his wife. The woman, now Aishiq’s pimp, has two other sons who live in a separate apartment nearby; one of the boys is the girl’s minder and accompanies her when she is sent to a client. She says she sees the second son every three days when he comes to force sex upon her. «One time I refused and he struck me, blood came out of my nose and mouth.»

Aishiq’s body is a roadmap of torture. A knife cut across her chin paired with a deep slice in the base of her thumb. Punishment by her minder. Her arms and hands are riddled with scabbed punctures to her skin. Some old, some new.

«This family when they punish me brings nails and heats them, tie me and stick the nails on my hands and arms», she says. We ask, «When do they punish you?» «When I ask for money, the money I’ve earned, they become angry and punish me. They won’t give me money.» Aishiq sleeps in a small space between the bathroom and the kitchen on a thin mattress. «They provide me with a little food and a place to sleep. The woman sends my money to Iraq to build a house in Kerbala.» She then pulls down her t-shirt and bares her scarred chest, mutilated by cooking oil thrown at her after she asked to buy a cream to sooth her itching skin. «They were cooking fish and threw the oil on my chest.» In the past when her injuries were too severe to treat at the home, she was taken to the hospital. In the hospital she was threatened that, «if you say something, we will kill you.»

As a consequence of the international blockade of the Gaza strip, underground contraband with Egypt has grown into a real industry. The traffic employs an army of workers, who are ready to put their lives at risk in exchange for a few banknotes.

(Translated from French)

Rafah, Benjamin Barthe, special correspondent

On this August evening, the heat is muggy and intoxicating. A makeshift streetlight sheds a feeble halo of light on an alley of the Shaburah refugee camp, in Rafah, Gaza’s dead end. Hossam and Mohamed Kak, two twenty year-old cousins, are hurrying toward the Egyptian border. After many penniless years, these two young fathers have struck it rich. For the past week, they have been working in the contraband tunnels dug beneath the coils of barbwire and the brick wall that separate the narrow strip of Palestinian territory from the Egyptian Sinai. This activity lures an army of workers, all of which have lost everything because of the blockade of Gaza. They are ready to risk it all in exchange for a few banknotes. “We hadn’t received our salary yet, says Mohamed, a hefty fellow with bulgy cheeks. But the owner of the tunnel had promised to give us a share of the benefit from that night’s load. At $100 per night, we were going to make a nice amount of money.”

On the premises, the Kak cousins meet two colleagues, Youssef, 17 years old, and Mahmoud, 43 years old. Their task is to carry hundreds of bags to the surface. The bags are filled with food destined to the grocers of Rafah, who are anxious to fill up their shelves, as it is the eve of Ramadan. “I asked the boss whether he had checked if the Egyptians had gassed the tunnels, as they had been doing more and more often, claims Mohamed. He answered me that he had gone down there for a smoke and that everything was OK.” Mohamed is the first to enter the pipe. Hossam and the two others follow him, with a ten meters interval between each of them. After twenty minutes in the tunnel, they sense a strange smell. Mohamed yells “gas”, but it is too late. His three companions are paralyzed. He runs back a few meters, and collapses. The rescuers retrieve four victims, out of which he is the only one to be revived. “Thank God he was saved”, says his father, Abdallah. The scene takes place three weeks later, and Abdallah is sitting in the courtyard of his little family house. “The others were less lucky. But I curse the tunnel owners who take advantage of our misery. And I also curse the Egyptian government, which kills our children and doesn’t send out warnings. If they want to stop contraband, let them open the Rafah border.”

“Anfaq”, the tunnels in Arabic… The word fires the imagination of all of Rafah’s damned, and it fuels the legend of this frontier city. Ever since the Israeli army’s withdrawal from Sinai in 1982, Rafah has been divided in two parts, one Egyptian, and the other Palestinian. The first tunnels appear at that time, as if to mock History’s diktats. A conduit dug into the sand, a pulley system, a basin to store the merchandise, and that does the trick. The border zone is so narrow, that a length of a few hundred meters is enough to reach the other side. The entrances to the tunnels are hidden beneath rugs on the ground floors of refugees’ shanties. As the trafficking exclusively involves everyday consumer goods, the Israeli soldiers who are stationed in the Gaza strip are inclined to be less vigilant. Thanks to cigarettes, soap, cheese and clothes, a few cunning Bedouins become rich.

It all gets more complicated when the second Intifada begins in October 2000. The big-wigs of the Palestinian security services confiscate some tunnels to improve their militia’s arsenals. In turn, the armed groups, especially Hamas, follow suit. Underground, Rafah’s transforms itself into a giant gun fair, with Kalachnikovs, antitank rockets, explosives, and even, according to the Israeli secret services, a few Stinger surface-to-air missiles. Tsahal bulldozes hundreds of houses along the border, to no avail. In the summer of 2005, contraband increases all the more that the Israeli army withdraws from the Gaza strip, and, as a consequence, from the Philadelphia corridor that runs along the border. When Hamas seizes power in June 2007, Gaza is quarantined, and the trafficking gains even more momentum.

The number of active tunnels is currently estimated to be approximately 300. The border being 12 kilometers long, one finds a new entrance every 40 meters. The amateurism of the early days has been replaced by a semi-clandestine industry, which yields over $10 million in taxes, collected by Hamas. “If ever there is an earthquake in the area, it will be a disaster, because Rafah’s subsoil is full of holes”, says Abu Mohamed, a grocer who gets all his supplies from the traffickers. “It is the Palestinians’ response to those who want to strangle them”, he adds, standing on the sidewalk in front of his street stall, named Al-Attabeh, after Place Atabeh, in Cairo, where the Egyptian black market flourishes.

At the beginning of the summer, the United States and Israel voiced concern over breaches to the embargo and pressed Egypt to intensify its fight. In a few weeks, with the help of specialized American engineers, approximately thirty tunnels were destroyed. They were dynamited, or sealed with concrete, or else flooded by diverting existing water pipes. Officially, Egypt denies the use of gases and blames fumes that would emanate from the gasoline cans that are transported by the traffickers. Since the beginning of the year, about thirty Palestinians, often young, have died underground in the Rafah area, either by accident, or because of Egyptian repression.

Mohamed, 18 years-old, looks rangy and juvenile, but his eyes are full of arrogance. He is one of these adolescent daredevils who are obsessed with the tunnels. His uncle, a high-profile trafficker, introduced him to the job a few months before the Israeli withdrawal. “In those days, we always worked at night, because we were afraid of army patrols. We had to be perfectly silent; we didn’t even have the right to cough. Nowadays, nobody hides anymore. There are tunnels all over the place”. About two hundred meters from an Egyptian watchtower, a house in ruins shelters Mohamed’s own tunnel. It opens onto a twenty-five meters deep metal conduit. A cradle, which is attached to a portico and activated by an electric winch, takes you all the way down. The pipe is 180 centimeters high and about 400 meters long, and it is built for comfort. It is equipped with lamps, but also a network of intercoms to communicate with the surface. A compressor ensures adequate oxygenation. “When I started to dig, I was afraid, says Mohamed. Now, it has become as natural as taking a shower. With a good team, it takes me just a month to open a new pipe.”

Over the last three years, the list of products that the young tunneller has imported into Rafah is longer than any supermarket’s inventory. Bottles of oil, gasoline cans, wheels of Gouda cheese, scooters, computers, bras, cell phones, car tires, sandals, cigarette cartons, Viagra tablets… His most surprising deal involved a batch of lion cubs and macaques for the Gaza zoo! Or maybe these “four Russian women” who wanted to be reunited with their Palestinian husbands, whom they had met during their medical studies in Moscow… “I have the best pay in the whole Gaza strip, mutters Mohamed, like a satiated professional. At the beginning of the year, at the peak of the cigarette shortage, I made $35 000 in a month. Back then, there were less active tunnels and you could earn up to $1000 a night. With the money, I bought a small piece of land where I will build my house.”

Abdel-Hadi Abu Amra perfectly knows these mavericks that have grown up too fast. He teaches English in a middle school which is built alongside the border. He believes that around one fourth of the institution’s 300 students work in the tunnels. He notices that they are often absent, that they look tired, and that they flaunt the most recent cell phones during recess time. “It’s like drugs, declares the teacher. Once they have tried the tunnels, they can’t stop anymore. I try to talk them out of it, but it’s useless. They answer that their father hasn’t earned a penny in years, and that their only option is to become criminals.” Mohamed the tunneller agrees and smiles knowingly. Every night, he goes up to his room and pretends to go to bed. When he hears his father’s snores, he gets out of bed and opens the window. Then he sinks into the night. The border, the land of imagination, has cast a spell on him.