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05/25/2004 Archived Entry: "Iraq’s “Ignorant Men”"

Posted by steve @ 06:58 PM EST [Link]

THEIR WAR WILL TAKE MUCH LONGER: Sorry (again) for the lack of blogging today. It was a nice cool day here at Fort Sinatra so I took the opportunity to play the manor lord and I went outside into the backyard with a Romeo y Julieta cigar -- courtesy of my sister's visit to the Caymen Islands last week -- and a book of poems.

At any rate, a good story over at NRO about the problems that women are facing in Iraqi society. Iraq may be liberated but the war for women's rights in an Islamic society is just beginning.

Even though I know schwayya Arabic, I sensed the Iraqi truckers squatting in the shade of an 18-wheeler weren't happy. After all, seated on the sidewalk opposite them, a foreigner was chatting with a beautiful Iraqi woman whose beige scarf, worn with a maroon blouse and tan-colored slacks, indicated she was Muslim. As they waited to drive their vehicles through the British checkpoint, the truckers' stares burned holes through us. My friend, Nour Al-Khal, a 20-something press liaison for an American NGO, felt it too, but advised me to do what she did when confronted by what she called her country's "ignorant men" — ignore them. "Believe me, Steve," she said, stretching out her legs and crossing them at the ankles. "There's nothing you can do."

We were sitting outside the British military base at Basra International Airport, waiting for soldiers to open the gate. The afternoon was hot, a desert wind blowing dust and grit across the asphalt. As the boredom mounted, a trucker stood and crossed the roadway. Looming over Nour, he snapped something in Arabic, causing her expression to fall and her body to flinch as she curled her legs beneath her. As the trucker strode back to his companions, I asked Nour what he'd said. "He demanded that I sit more like a respectable Muslim woman," she replied in an embarrassed voice. Angered at the man's effrontery, I rose to confront him, only to be halted again by Nour's demurrals. "You'll only cause me trouble." Sadly, she was right. Convening a one-man Morals Police for the sole purpose of humiliating a woman, the trucker had acted in the name of the force we had no defense against: Islam.

Read on.