Women are not lunar creatures or satanic beings as many in our country consider them. On the contrary, they are men's partners and mates on this ample earth. It is disturbing to find people attribute human misery and suffering to Eve's daughters. They put all the blame for our problems on women all the time, forgetting that men could equally be blamed. In fact, human history is full of examples of major calamities which have been the result of men's mistakes. We cannot overlook the havoc and destruction because of men's unwise decisions. Millions and millions of people were trodden over by wars and holocausts, because of male decision-makers. However, this is not my point.

The experience of nations is often caught and summaried in their proverbs and sayings. We rely on proverbs to drive a point home, or to re-cap a position, or to support a viewpoint. In other words, we take proverbs as truths which we use to convince others, regardless of their possible inaccuracies or injustice. In short, proverbs have come to stand for proper conduct, and they regulate our attitudes and behavior.

Unfortunately for women, they are at the center of many proverbs. They portray them sometimes as angels, but more often as evil. Even more unfortunately, such proverbial injustice prevails in most languages, confirming that the proverbs and sayings were coined by men and male dominated socities and experiences.
Needless to say there are proverbs which praise and elevate women in all societies, but the majority are negative to women.

The following English proverbs tell the bias:
"Women are the devil's net."
"Women are necessary evils."
"Many women and evil are thru degrees."
"Devil is dead when there is a wife"
"No woman, no cry."
"An ass would climb a ladder,
if you find wisdom in women."
"A woman and a cherry are painted for their own harm."
"Groaning horse and groaning wife."
"Trust not a woman when she weeps."
"Women and music should never be dated."
"Women are as wavering as the wind."
"Women naturally deceive, weep and spin."
"A woman is a weather cock."
"Women are the root of all evil."

There are many German contributions, like:
"A widow is an easily-ridden low wall."
"A woman is man's evil."

The French ones include the following:
"Woman is like roasted meat;
the more you beat, the softlier it will be."
"A woman is a must mischief"

But the real bad ones come from the East. Many proverbs from China, Japan, Korea, Vietnam and other societies almost outright demean women. They are given a low esteem and status. Of course, there are many positive proverbs, but I am talking here about the bad ones.

In the Arabic language, women-related proverbs abound, and there are quite a few bad ones. Let me select some really negative ones, as follows:
"A woman is like a scorpion.
She is not smiling when she shows her teeth."
"A woman is like a snake.""Never abandon your secret with a woman.""A woman is an evil you can't live without.""Women are deficient in mind and faith."Really, now! Those are unfair accusations of women.

When Islam came to the bedouin Arabs, a millennium and a half ago, society was visibly anti-women. The religion, through many teachings and re-structuring of the rights and relations between men and women, pushed to soften the negative attitude, if not to fully reverse it. This is clear from many verses in the Quran. It also can be seen from sayings attributed to the Prophet Muhammad (pbuh). Here are examples:

"Remember. I leave with you in this fareswell sermon a heavy duty and responsibility towards women. I enjoin you to treat them fairly."
"Be kind to women, for they are fragile."
"The best among you are those who are the best to their women."
"Heaven is under the feet of mothers."
"Contentment of parents leads to God's."

Eventually, human life is, of couse, impossible, wouthout women. Even the most zealot of men realize that the tender sweethearts are our partners The reason we have a disproportionate share of bad sayings on women is that the human civilization has really been a man's civilization, for the major part. In other words, men coined most of these proverbs. The question that remains is: "Can we make a conscious effort to correct the imbalance?"

 

News of great men travels. It was therefore no surprise to me that, while reading my email this week, I should learn of the death on December 31 of Yemeni folk poet Shayf al-Khaledi. But email is an unsympathetic medium, and hardly able to translate for me the loss and grief that hundreds of thousands of Yemenis -- from shepherds in the most remote valleys of Lahej and Abyan to multi-millionaires in Jeddah, Paris, and New York -- are feeling this month. Many English-speakers will not be familiar with the life and work of this extraordinary man. A brief introduction to al-Khaledi now, after his death, seems not too late given that his voice always had an uncanny ability to transcend its place and time.

Shayf al-Khaledi was born in a remote village of Yafi`a (a region spanning Lahej and Abyan) in 1932. While settlement in his area was sparse, his district of al-Qu`iti was known for its fierce and influential role in the history of the region and Yemen as a whole. One of his fellow Qu`iti had in fact migrated to India over two-hundred years earlier, established a powerful sultanate in Hyderabad and then returned to Hadramawt to set up what became known as "the Qu`iti State." al-Khaledi grew up knowing that he had a mighty legacy to continue.

He began contributing to local social and political affairs through poetry. In a region where, like many in Yemen, the settlement of controversy and disputes had long been managed through persuasive poems, al-Khaledi quickly distinguished himself as an eloquent and sagacious orator: an extremely valued member of a tribal society. He spent much of his youth traveling around Yafi`a to negotiate, learning much of his neighbors, his region, and its histories. His experience as a folk poet and mediator vastly expanded when he traveled to Aden for the first time in 1947. In working as a day-laborer in the port for three years, he saw first-hand the practices and consequences of colonialism for his fellow workers, most of whom were from the former Protectorate areas as well as Northern regions. It was during these years that he began formulating his ideas about nationalism, pan-Arabism and Yemen's place in larger international contexts.

When the Revolution of 1962 broke out in the North, al-Khaledi abandoned his work in Aden and as a shepherd in Abyan in order to join forces against the Royalists. He spent four years fighting in the North, later returning to help drive the British out of Aden by 1967. These were powerful experiences for al-Khaledi that shaped and sharpened his ideas about Yemen and its people. As the national projects got underway in the PDRY and YAR respectively, al-Khaledi would become a national poet par excellence. By drawing from a rich tradition of symbolic expression that was profoundly moral and spiritual in outlook, he used his poems consistently to articulate national objectives from the perspective of the working majority: farmers, mechanics, small store-owners, taxi-cab drivers, as well as the makers and breakers of local politics. His language was colloquial, not the product of an elite education; yet for that reason his words were at once extremely rich and accessible to popular audiences. By drawing upon wonderful gestes of rural humor, folk wisdom, and local histories, he spoke powerfully about national issues: unity (for which he was a long-time supporter), the need to crack down on corruption and bribery (both by leadership cadres during the years of the PDRY and after unity), the hardships of economic reforms on the people (since southern regions had experienced enormous swings in economic
orientation), the centrality of religious life to good citizenship (including criticism of radical Islamist movements), and many other issues.

One of the reasons that al-Khaledi became such an influential voice for so many is traceable in no small way to his extremely prolific production. By the dawn of the revolution of 1967 it is said he had composed over one thousand qasaid (a qasidah is a traditional, formal genre of Arabic poetry), and such production continued unabated until his death. While he excelled in many poetic genres (including extemporaneous genres delivered in competitive bouts variously known as rajzah, Sufuuf, balah, daan, etc.), he was a master of the bid` wa jawaab genre (also known as the da`wah wa ijaabah genre) in which one poet sends a qasidah to another poet and the second poet responds with a qasidah that uses the same meter and rhyme structure. This is one of the most exciting and politically charged genres of poetry for many Yemeni audiences, and by the end of his life al-Khaledi had established a reputation widely as "the poet of ripostes" (shaa`ir al-jawaab), a man whose quick wit and well-tuned responses left the corresponding poet either defeated or gasping for another chance to defend himself.

It was the audio-cassette that extended al-Khaledi's prolific production and reputation to hundreds of thousands of listeners. While he had begun to use cassettes as early as the mid fifties, by the mid 1990s his poems were being distributed in huge quantities throughout Yemen as well as the Gulf and abroad. His poems have been sung especially by Yafi`i musicians and are set to the `oud (the well-known Middle Eastern lute) and sometimes a variety of drums, flutes and tambourines. But emphasis is given less to the music as much as his words. These words became especially relevant to listeners throughout Yemen when, thanks to the cassette, he was able to use poetic exchanges in order to establish a
national dialogue with poets from many different regions throughout Yemen.

While exchanges over the course of more than twenty years were sometimes hot and often political, he adhered to the tradition of mutual respect for other poets that has long marked the practice of poetry in Yemen and, might I add, the spirit of democracy that is so fundamental to the outlook of many Yemeni in both rural and urban areas. Cassettes enabled the extension of a lively genre of poetry that has long existed but which, through al-Khaledi's leadership, developed a particularly popular orientation in recent years.

The remarkable thing about al-Khaledi was how extremely personable he was. Modest about his accomplishments, he was always quick to give credit to others, to sit with diverse groups of people and to encourage younger poets at every opportunity. His sociability and open-mindedness made my task all the easier. Working as an anthropologist for several years in Yemen, I was able to collect and translate many of his poems and complete a detailed history of his life just six months before he died. I remember my first impression of him at the local market in Lab`us, near his village in Yafi`a, where he paced around with a plastic sack in hand, bought the day's groceries and supplies, chatted with others and swapped news as if the boundaries of the world were just over the hill. As I quickly discovered, the parochial image was deceiving. Everywhere he went in Yafi`a and `Aden people greeted him; delegations visiting from as far as Hadramawt, Sana`a and Ma'rib regularly sought him out, gave him the podium and devoured his poems; migrant communities in the Gulf, Britain and the United States were passionate about his poetry and the latest cassettes. Ironically, and most revealingly, he was relatively anonymous in official Yemeni media, academic institutions, and circles of the intellectual elite. His poetry, rather than couched in the elevated diction and conventional imagery of classical Arabic poetry, was sung in a familiar, colloquial tongue; his language, rather than replicating the discourses of those in circles of power, spoke to the concerns of popular Yemeni audiences. Ultimately, his poetry filled gaps and interpreted ruptures in political discourses, and for precisely that reason was remarkably mobile.

The last time I wa with al-Khaledi, we attended a rural wedding celebration together. We'd spent the previous evening with our eyes glued to the television set, watching France beat Brazil in the World Cup; he had been an avid observer through the final moments, late into the night, so I assumed that on the following night he would retire early. As dinner at the wedding was concluded and people gathered to dance, a poetic competition was set up. 


Poets slowly gathered to compete extemporaneously, and soon al-Khaledi was in the center of a ring of challengers, each vying for an opportunity to produce a few perfectly measured and rhymed verses that could dislodge the "poet of ripostes" from his throne. The drums beat furiously, the dancers romped, and neither the tournament nor al-Khaledi showed any signs of abating by the time I crept exhausted into bed at two in the morning. I remember being amazed and relieved that al-Khaledi had the constitution to endure longer than a fit 30-year old. It is therefore with deep sorrow that, in writing an obituary, I reflect on how audiences young and old alike have been deprived of a man who had such a love for his country, a commitment to his neighbors, and a passion for poetry.

W. Flagg Miller
Department of Anthropology
University of Michigan

 

When the new moon is expected to appear, people go out to mosques and parks in order to have a glimpse of it. When a definite sighting is made, Eid Al-Fitr is declared, and children happily go out singing in the streets. It is easy to see happiness in children's eyes when the are taken by their parents to buy clothes and toys for the Eid.

Every one of us has special fond memories about Eid, not only about buying new clothes, but also about waiting for the first day of Eid to wear these clothes. It is as if an intimate meeting will take place between the children and their new clothes. Some of us remember how he or she sued to open his cupboard to look at these beautiful new things. They are eager to wear these clothes and appear in front of their friends and relatives. Memory also holds the most beautiful moments of waiting for the happiness of wearing the new clothes which fades a few hours after taking them off. So the Eid starts before its date by a short time.

The Eid traditions are almost the same on the public and personal levels. In all nights of the Eid, people stay up late until the early hours of the following day. In all Islamic areas, everything starts at the dawn of the first Eid day. Children and adults go to the mosque to the Eid prayers. Everybody comes out of the mosque before sunrise to exchange the traditional greetings and felicitations - "kul aam wa antum bikhair" or many happy returns.

At the mosque, calls of Allahu Akbar or God is great rise to heaven. The faithful would feel his voice coming from deep within his soul and that he has an unlimited energy of light and ability to communicate with God. God's wisdom manifests itself not only in presenting the power of Muslims in their congregation, but also in creating the feeling that a person acquires more strength of conscience by being beside another Muslim praying to god. A Muslim person may not even know the name of the other Muslim beside him or her, but knows that he or she is also honestly and spontaneously praying to God and calling Allahu Akbar.
This great meeting of Muslims during the first few hours of the Eid is a major celebration of this sacred occasion. These rituals have been known since the time of the Prophet Mohammed (P) when they were characterized by simplicity and solemnity, and were done in a quiet manner. With the passage of time, however, these rituals acquired a lot of variety and color.

Religious occasions during the time of the Abbasyd dynasty saw many social features. Men in the Caliph's entourage stayed with him throughout the night of the Eid until dawn broke. They then went to the mosque headed by the Caliph riding on a white horse and surrounded by his soldiers. People chanted in the street praising God and the Caliph who prayed in the mosque in front of other men and later delivered the Eid sermon. Upon the return of the Caliph's procession to the palace, banquets are held and poets recited their poems eulogizing the Caliph.

The first hours of the first morning of eid are similar in all Muslim towns and cities. After the dawn prayers and the exchange of felicitations, people start doing their own special traditions which differ from one country to another. Many people visit their relatives and friends to exchange greetings. Some people nowadays use the telephone for this purpose. Eid is truly a happy occasion for all Muslims. For this reason new habits have appeared in many Muslim societies. Children in particular engage in many festive activities. The first thing a child looks forwards to is the "Eidia" or the gift money given by the child's senior relatives. The amount of money given varies according to the seniority and closeness of that relative. This Eidia is seen as a huge fortune by the little children who use it to buy sweets or go to parks and fun fares.

Thus, Eid is an opportunity of children to become grownups for a short period of time. They start to behave as if they are an economic establishment. They save their money and divide the expenditure over the Eid days. It is very joyful to see children in their bright colored clothes playing in parks and enjoying themselves.

There is no doubt that Eid belongs to children immediately after its early hours. Some children accompany their parents, while, others prefer to be independent and go together with their friends to the place they themselves choose. So Eid is a good opportunity for a little child to feel his or her independence for the first time. Some of us may remember those moments when we felt that we didn't want to ask the older people for Eidia because we felt that we had become adults and were far removed from the world of childhood.

During the last few years, new habits have entered our lives that became gradually connected with Eid. Radio, TV, and now satellite TV are competing with each other to bring happiness to the people during Eid. Various programs, happy songs, comedy plays, films and other activities are presented during Eid.

As long as people stay at home then Eid is connected with food. Each Eid has its own special types of food. Eid is celebrated by the artists and ordinary people alike who find a lot of opportunity to express themselves. The main Eid celebrations, though, are performing its religious rituals when people are united by the words "There is no God but Allah and Mohammed is His Prophet". These awe-inspiring words arouse feelings of reverence among the faithful. The hearts of all Muslim people look forward to the next Ramadhan.

By Ismail Al-Ghabir