Copyright Gulf News Dubai
Here's a bit more on the story of this remarkable woman from Dubai's Gulf News.
Wednesday 24 March is the final round in the Million's Poet Contest. The winner will be announced a week later.
His some biographical data. She's in her forties, married and the mother of a number of children. Number unspecified here but GN says four. She uses the name "Rimiya" and has been a popular (in the sense of peoples' as opposed to elite) poet for over 20 years. The GN says she was editor of poetry at AlHayat, a pan Arabic newspaper (owned by Saudi interests). So all this talk of her being a housewife ignores her career.
She has said that both she and her family were frightened by the threats against her. Her family has advised her to steer clear of topics such as "mixing" of the sexes, vote for women, and religious extremism. She made the point that her poem was about the latter - not Ikhilat (mixing), though she did note that she did not agree with Shaykh AlBarrak's fatwa as mixing in the workplace was a necessity of life. As a side note, Shaykh AlBarrak appears to have clarified his fatwa to mean unsupervised "mixing" - which would not include mixed classes at the university or at the workplace.
For those who criticized her for reciting poetry in public, she cited two examples. Aisha Bint Talha who was a noted poet and was married to four of the companions of the Prophet Muhammad (SAAWAWS). This is not the Aisha who was married to the Prophet (SAAWS). And AlKhansa'a.
All posts on Hissa now have the label "Hissa Hilal".
All posts on Hissa now have the label "Hissa Hilal".
Posts
2 comments:
It continues to amaze me (after 7 years in Dubai) how similar we can be and yet how far apart, alien even. The 'we' in this case means the broadly defined categories 'Westerners' and 'Muslims'. To me, the'controversy' of whether a woman should read publicly about mixing of sexes is a glimpse into Stone Age.
TRN
There are backward people in just about every culture.
In my own country, two prominent television pastors explained on 12 September 2001 that the attacks on 11 September were God's punishment for equal rights for women, rights for gays, abortion. One of these "pastors" called for the nuking of the State Department and led a series of prayers that God would kill Supreme Court Justices so that the current president could appoint Godly people to the Supreme Court.
Religion is often conflated with folkways and social customs/traditions that have nothing to do with it.
If one goes back through the history of Islam, one finds women in a wide variety of roles - businesswomen, warriors, poets. And there are more than one cases of women in Islam at that time refusing the veil.
Post a Comment