by Zahra Hankir
Praise for
OUR WOMEN ON THE GROUND
“A compelling and gripping read.”
—Middle East Monitor
“Out of the gloom of the Middle East, this book brims with new voices—Arab women reporting on their world as no one else has seen it, with courage, inspiration, and resilience. A terrific read, full of insight and surprise.”
—David E. Hoffman, former foreign editor of The Washington Post and Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Billion Dollar Spy
“A remarkable book that fills a tremendous gap, as mainstream media coverage of the Middle East and Arab world has long been dominated by men or outsiders. The voices of these trailblazing women are even more vital today, when the region’s upheaval cannot be explained without local, and especially female, perspectives.”
—Hassan Hassan, New York Times bestselling co-author of ISIS
“This astounding, affecting collection offers a sweeping panorama of the contemporary Arab experience—heartland and exile; repression and liberation; violence and love. I struggle to think of any work of reportage that has so fully depicted the many-layered recent history of this vibrant and traumatized region. Rich with understanding and sincere emotional connection to the people and places that drive the news, this book contains voices that are both fresh and necessary.”
—Megan K. Stack, author of Women’s Work
“A dazzling book that elegantly demonstrates how to tell stories with humility, affection, and truthfulness.”
—Azadeh Moaveni, author of Lipstick Jihad and Honeymoon in Tehran
“The stories of how these women crossed boundaries and pushed the limits professionally, culturally, and personally are stark and haunting. I loved this book, for its courage but also for the fact that the future of news will be told by local correspondents whose passion for justice and truth shines through. A must-read for anyone who wants to see a side of news from the Middle East they would never see by watching the nightly news.”
—Janine di Giovanni, author of The Morning They Came for Us
“With steely courage and pens of fire, these sahafiyat—Arab female journalists—tell the stories of their country’s conflicts, providing rigor, depth, and insight few outside commenters could match.”
—Molly Crabapple, author of Drawing Blood and illustrator of Brothers of the Gun
PENGUIN BOOKS
OUR WOMEN ON THE GROUND
ZAHRA HANKIR is a Lebanese British journalist who writes about the intersection of politics, culture, and society in the Middle East. Her writing and journalism have appeared on BBC News, Bloomberg News, Vice, and Al Jazeera English, and in Roads & Kingdoms and Literary Hub, among other media outlets. She was awarded a Jack R. Howard Fellowship in International Journalism to attend the Columbia Journalism School and holds degrees in politics and Middle Eastern studies from the American University of Beirut and the University of Manchester.
CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR is CNN’s chief international anchor and host of the network’s award-winning, flagship global affairs program Amanpour, which also airs on PBS in the United States. She is based in the network’s London bureau. Christiane’s illustrious career in journalism spans more than three decades. After joining CNN in 1983, Amanpour rose through the organization, becoming the network’s leading international correspondent reporting on crises in the Gulf, Iraq, Afghanistan, North Korea, Palestinian territories, Iran, Sudan, Israel, Pakistan, Somalia, Rwanda, the Balkans, Egypt, and Libya. Amanpour has interviewed most of the top world leaders over the past two decades and has received every major broadcast award, including an inaugural Television Academy Award, eleven News and Documentary Emmys, four Peabody Awards, and nine honorary degrees. In 2014, she was inducted into the Cable Hall of Fame and in 2018 into the Broadcasting & Cable Hall of Fame. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire, an honorary citizen of Sarajevo, and a UNESCO Goodwill Ambassador. Amanpour is a graduate of the University of Rhode Island.
PENGUIN BOOKS
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Introduction and selection copyright © 2019 by Zahra Hankir
Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.
The essays in this book are the copyrighted property of the respective writers.
“What Normal?” by Hwaida Saad, “Words, Not Weapons” by Shamael Elnoor, and “Between the Explosions” by Asmaa al-Ghoul are translated by Mariam Antar. Translation copyright © 2019 by Mariam Antar.
Excerpt on this page from “Dedication” from Bilingual Blues by Gustavo Pérez Firmat (Bilingual Press, 1995). © Gustavo Pérez Firmat. Used with permission.
Photograph on this page by Ellen Emmerentze Thommessen Jervell. Used with permission.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Names: Hankir, Zahra, editor. | Amanpour, Christiane, writer of foreword.
Title: Our women on the ground : essays by Arab women reporting from the Arab world / edited by Zahra Hankir ; foreword by Christiane Amanpour.
Description: New York, New York : Penguin Books, 2019. | Includes bibliographical references.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018052511 (print) | LCCN 2019012777 (ebook) | ISBN 9780143133414 (paperback) | ISBN 9780525505204 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Women journalists—Arab countries—Biography. | Reporters and reporting—Arab countries. | Women in journalism— Arab countries. | Women in the mass media industry—Arab countries. | Women—Arab countries—Social conditions.
Classification: LCC P94.5.W652 (ebook) | LCC P94.5.W652 A737 2019 (print) | DDC 070.4082—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018052511
Penguin is committed to publishing works of quality and integrity. In that spirit, we are proud to offer this book to our readers; however, the stories, the experiences, and the words are those of the authors alone.
Cover design: Na Kim
Version_1
To Atwar Bahjat, Mayada Ashraf, Layal Nagib, Malika Sabour, and the Arab and Middle Eastern women journalists and photojournalists who lost their lives while reporting from their homelands.
Contents
Praise for Our Women On The Ground
About the Editor
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Foreword by Christiane Amanpour
Introduction: Sahafiya by Zahra Hankir
REMEMBRANCES
The Woman Question by Hannah Allam
Love and Loss in a Time of Revolution by Nada Bakri
What Normal? by Hwaida Saad
On a Belated Encounter with Gender by Lina Attalah
CROSSFIRE
Maps of Iraq by Jane Arraf
Spin by Natacha Yazbeck
Bint el-Balad by Nour Malas
Hull & Hawija by Hind Hassan
RESILIENCE
Just Stop by Eman Helal
Three Girls from Morocco by Aida Alami
Words, Not Weapons by Shamael Elnoor
Yemeni Women with Fighting Spirits by Amira Al-Sharif
EXILE
Between the Explosions by Asmaa al-Ghoul
Breathing Fear by Lina Sinjab
Hurma by Zaina Erhaim
TRANSITION
Syria Undone by Zeina Karam
An Orange Bra in Riyadh by Donna Abu-Nasr
Dying Breed by Roula Khalaf
Acknowledgments
Notes
About the Contributors
Foreword
I began my career as a foreign correspondent in the first Gulf War, and somehow, serendipitously, CNN paired me up with an all-female camera crew. That was the summer of 1990, in Saudi Arabia. Suffice to say we were an unusual-looking team! But somehow it worked; our gender and our professionalism actually opened doors instead of slamming them in our faces.
Since then I have worked alongside many great female journalists from all over the world, from my fellow anchors and correspondents to producers and photojournalists. I have discovered them to be some of the bravest, most inspiring, provocative, energetic, and resourceful of my colleagues.
The Balkan wars of the 1990s represented a game-changing shift in the rules of our road. It was during those conflicts that our reporters’ immunity ended; no longer were we considered neutral objective witnesses. We became deliberate targets. Ever since, journalists have been swallowed up into the tribal politics of the global environment, pulled—usually against our will—into one ideological corner or another.
My late colleague Margaret Moth, a camerawoman, was shot by a sniper and almost killed in Sarajevo. The van in which she was traveling was clearly labeled as a press vehicle, but it didn’t matter. The bullet shattered her jaw, blew out her teeth and part of her tongue. All of us were immensely angry at what had happened to her, but Margaret was philosophical. “I don’t blame anyone for firing at me,” she said. “They’re in a war and I stepped into it.” She returned to Bosnia as soon as she was physically able. She was utterly fearless and a source of inspiration for journalists across the world. I see Margaret’s attitude and spirit in many other women who live and work amid the unrest and oppression that the world endures today.
The journalists in this book have demonstrated the highest professional achievements and courage. Of course, many of these journalists are local, covering their own homelands. Many of their stories are in the Middle East and the Arab world, where societal norms and traditions continue to place complex obstacles in the paths of women. To become a journalist in some of these places takes a special kind of courage for a woman. It can mean defying family and community, and it brings unique challenges and entails sacrifices specific to women.
But women’s voices are crucial to gaining a full understanding of a story. Without the female perspective the full picture simply cannot be painted, and often—particularly in the Middle East and the Arab world—female protagonists can be given a voice only by other women. Women can enter places and speak to people their male colleagues simply cannot. Sometimes they can ask questions that would not be tolerated from their male counterparts.
Conflict zones today are even more dangerous than those that I experienced decades ago in Bosnia. Lines are more blurred, actions less predictable, the consequences of mistakes more dire. Those who choose to enter these theaters, both male and female, deserve our respect and admiration. As professional journalists we must continue to nurture, encourage, support, protect, and fight for those who make this choice. We must also make sure more women are among their ranks, because without them the stories of today and tomorrow will remain only partly told.
CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR
Introduction: Sahafiya
I come from there
and I have memories.
—MAHMOUD DARWISH
When I first visited Ruqia Hasan’s Facebook page, in 2014, I was struck by her profile photo. The Syrian woman had paired a black hijab with a figure-hugging top that was embroidered with gold sequins. Her eyebrows were impeccably groomed, and bronzer contoured her cheekbones. It was a daring look, considering she lived in Raqqa—the northern Syrian city that was, at that time, controlled by the most brutal Islamist group in the world. Most striking, though, was the defiant expression on Ruqia’s face, a defiance reflected in each one of her Facebook posts. Everything about the petite woman screamed: “I am here and I will not be silenced.”
Ruqia was a sahafiya—a woman journalist—who secretly reported on the crimes of ISIS from inside Raqqa. But she was no ordinary reporter, at least by mainstream media standards. The thirty-year-old of Kurdish descent* wasn’t employed by a major news outlet. She never had a byline or a dateline and was never trained to cover warfare. She hadn’t conducted any interviews, and she certainly wasn’t impartial: she’d participated in antigovernment protests and openly criticized Syrian president Bashar al-Assad.
Online, Ruqia was fearless, even though vocal opponents of ISIS were often swiftly executed. The citizen sahafiya wrote in chilling detail under a pen name, Nissan Ibrahim, about the atrocities the group was waging on the people of Raqqa. She shared her reports on Facebook, sometimes posting several times a day. As Ruqia amassed a large social media following, her friends advised her to take down the photos of herself that were viewable to the public to protect her identity, but she refused.
A philosophy graduate of the University of Aleppo, Ruqia was known for the personal, poetic, and somber tone of her social media posts, which were always written in Arabic. She wavered between reporting what she’d witnessed and writing about how she felt. In December 2014, less than a year after ISIS declared Raqqa the capital of its caliphate, she posted the following: “In Syria, life and dignity have become two parallel lines that never meet.”
Ruqia mostly referred to ISIS as Daesh, an acronym for al-Dawla al-Islamiya fi al-Iraq wa al-Sham (the Islamic State of Iraq and Greater Syria), which has reportedly drawn the ire of some ISIS commanders as it strips the terror group’s label of its reference to Islam.
“Daesh has closed all internet cafés in the countryside, and most likely in the city, too,” the citizen sahafiya wrote in June 2015. “Without the internet, we will lose our only way of communicating. Dear God: Emigration is a loss of dignity and a form of humiliation, while staying here is hell. Dear God: Where should we go?”
What Ruqia presented in her harrowing posts was an authentic account of the events unraveling on the ground in Raqqa. Those accounts came at a time when few Westerners could report from within Syria, but they nonetheless commanded the international journalistic narrative on the country from afar.
One of Ruqia’s final posts on Facebook was also her most unsettling. “I’m in Raqqa, and I’ve received death threats,” she wrote on July 20, 2015. “When ISIS soldiers arrest me and kill me, it will be okay, because while they will cut off my head, I’ll still have dignity, which is better than living in humiliation.”
Shortly after that post, Ruqia was abducted by ISIS and never heard from again. In January 2016, her brother received confirmation from the terror group that she had been murdered along with five other women. At the time of this writing, Ruqia’s body had not been returned to her family.
Well before Ruqia was killed, I wondered what her story was. Why did she turn to writing and citizen journalism, despite knowing that death would be a very likely outcome of her outspokenness? Why did she choose the pen name “Nissan,” which means “April” in Arabic? How did she reconcile the identity she presented online with what was expected of her at home or by the society she lived in?
* * *
—
Much like Ruqia, scores of women in or from the Arab world and broader Middle East have quietly and courageously risked their lives to write about the coming apart of their region. These women are fierce reporters who have helped shape the narratives of perhaps the most important moments in their homelands’ modern history, a time of failed revolutions and violent warfare, widespread political and social upheaval, and the worst refugee crisis sin
ce the end of the Second World War. And yet, despite their access, expertise, and the obstacles they must overcome in order to do their jobs, they haven’t received as much attention as their Western and often white male peers.
Our Women on the Ground presents intimate and rarely heard accounts of what it’s like for a woman to report on a region she hails from. The stories of the nineteen sahafiyat whose essays make up this collection are crucial—not only because they have contributed to our understanding of what is transpiring in some of the most dangerous countries and protracted conflicts in the world, but also because they intrepidly crush stereotypes of what it means to be an Arab or Middle Eastern woman today, especially in the era of U.S. president Donald Trump, the rise of populism and the far right in Europe and elsewhere, and ISIS.
Arab women are indeed misunderstood on multiple levels and by multiple groups. On one hand, an Arab woman may be victimized or pitied by outsiders who think her to be “submissive,” “oppressed,” or “subjugated.” She is occasionally boxed into one identity, whereby, for example, her Arab identity is (incorrectly) conflated with a Muslim one. And she is frequently exoticized or superficially celebrated. On the other hand, an outspoken Arab woman is sometimes deemed improper, or an anomaly, by both outsiders and the society around her. Professionally, she might be considered less of a “threat” than her male peers, or not taken seriously. And she is sometimes actively silenced or passively unheard.
This anthology is, in part, an effort to disrupt such flimsy stereotypes. The sahafiyat come from different generations, faiths, and nationalities, reflecting the diversity of an entire region. They are writers, reporters, broadcast journalists, and photojournalists who work for newspapers, websites, magazines, and television networks. The women are reporters employed by international and local media outlets, as well as independent, freelance, and citizen journalists. They started their reporting careers in the 1980s, 1990s, 2000s, and 2010s—some are veterans, while others are emerging. Four have stepped away from the field. Their countries of origin include Lebanon, Syria, Egypt, Morocco, Yemen, Libya, Palestine, Sudan, and Iraq.