Deborah Kanafani: Invisibility Unveiled

Women in the Middle East working for women’s rights and peace are subjects all but invisible in the U.S. media. In her book, Unveiled: How an American Woman Found Her Way Through Politics, Love and Obedience in the Middle East, Deborah Kanafani writes a personal memoir of her difficult marriage to one of Yassir Arafat’s chief advisors and her struggle to regain her two children lost to her under Islamic law. Into her narrative, she weaves the stories of resilient Arab women who—from a place of relative power—organize to try to keep women safe, in the midst of war and everyday violence. I asked her to describe some of these determined women.

What impressed me about so many of the women I met was that while they were privileged, and for the most part, married to leaders and could have very luxurious lives, instead they chose to use their positions to help other women in their country, to work for peace, or both.

I start with Queen Dina, born in Egypt and the first wife of King Hussein of Jordan, who spent much of her life devoted to working for peace between Israelis and Palestinians. Now in her late 70s and suffering from Alzheimer’s, her story is one of romance, intrigue and bravery. Her marriage to King Hussein ended after a year, and a decade later she fell in love with the leader of the Palestinian military forces, Salah Tamari. In 1983, with the help of an Israeli journalist, she negotiated a large prisoner exchange, with 5,000 Palestinians freed, Tamari among them, for six Israeli soldiers.

Raymonda Tawil, whose daughter Suha married Yassir Arafat, is a Palestinian journalist and author who opened her house in Nablas in the West Bank to Israelis and Palestinians for salons and discussions in the 1970s. Because of this, a lot of Palestinians considered her a traitor. Raymonda is coauthoring a book with Ruth Dayan, former wife of the Israeli leader Moshe Dayan. The two women have been working together for peace for the last 40 years.

When a fundamentalist sheik claimed that the Quran allowed wife beating, Toujan Al Faisal, an Islamic scholar and former television journalist, publicly debated him and won. The ultra conservative Muslim Brotherhood went after her for her positions on women and Islamic law; they demanded her execution for apostasy against Islam.

Because of public outcry her trial was postponed indefinitely. Toujan is the only woman ever elected to the Jordanian Parliament by the people, although other women have been appointed. She also works for transparency and democracy in government, and founded an institute for democracy in Jordan. Most recently when Toujan exposed government corruption in an open letter on the Internet, she was jailed. Her crime? Tarnishing the state. On the 29th day of her hunger strike in 2002 she was finally released, thanks to pressure from Amnesty International. But she is prohibited from running for election in her country.

I also got to know a group of incredibly brave and inspiring young girls in Ramallah. Only 13 and 14 years old, they started an underground movement to help other girls who were potential victims of honor killings. Their tool was a secret shelter. They went to villages under the pretext of talking to girls about health issues. Once alone with them, they explained that if someone started a rumor about them and they feared for their lives, they could go into the shelter. If the Muslim Brotherhood or other conservative sheiks had found out what they were doing, they could have easily been killed. I did what I could to help them organize.

There are no reliable statistics about honor killings. It is a crime in only one Arab country, Jordan, and it usually brings only a very light sentence. When I asked Toujan Al Faisal what can be done, she said “be our messenger. Go back home and tell people about these things.” Because many of these countries rely on foreign aid, we can pressure our government to hold back aid until the country clamps down on such crimes. Toujan believes it was foreign journalists exposing honor killing in Jordan that helped get a law in place—even if a weak one.

When I lived in Palestine, I did an hour-long weekly television program on women’s rights. It was empowering and informative—interviews with women who are doctors, lawyers, Islamic scholars, teachers. There were many co-existence programs supported by donor countries. For instance, Palestinians and Israelis would make films or learn new editing techniques together, while the byproduct was getting people to know one another. Our group for co-existence at the station, located in the West Bank, was meeting with Israelis through the Peres Center in Israel to make a peace channel. But that never happened. In the Intifada or Uprising of 2000, the station was bombed and Hamas took over, running it from Gaza.

Since then, more than 230 peace groups have been formed and very many of them are run by women—groups such as Parents Circle-Familes Forum, which is a grassroots organization of bereaved Palestinians and Israelis who work to promote reconciliation. But we see only the warmongers in the media. I included the list of peace groups with their web sites in my book, because I want to show people there are peace efforts going on and they need to be supported.