Amany, the general director of Girls Only, holds a Bachelor of Science in computer science and works as a graphic designer. She is an enthusiastic young woman who wants to contribute to society by removing the hurdles that stand in the way of change and progress. At first, she thought of publishing a magazine, but then she realized that people nowadays are attracted to audio and visual media more than print ones. So, she decided to make a radio station. She looked for other girls with modern views and creative ideas, and together they started Girls Only, which is available only over the Internet. As Amany is well aware, putting her content on the Internet is the best way to avoid government censorship. Amany is not concerned by the seemingly limited scope of an online radio station; she believes that “in five years or less from now, Internet radio stations will be much more listened to than ordinary radio.”

The station aims to be an outlet for women who have long been silenced. “The idea of the radio station came to me as I was trying to imagine the future of Egyptian women… I felt so worried about it,” said Amany.

In a very short period of time, the station has succeeded in attracting a huge audience all over the Arab World. According to Amany, there are now more than 25,000 listeners everyday from Egypt, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Jordan, Lebanon, Sudan, Libya, Tunisia, Morocco, and Algeria; the number of listeners is increasing daily. Listeners range from 9 to 55 years old.
The radio station’s major success comes from its intriguing talk shows. One example is “It’s Not Life Any More,” in which issues such as divorce, spinsterhood, and unemployment are discussed. Another show, “She’s Worth a 100 Men” focuses on helping women build self-confidence, control their anger, demand their rights and deal more effectively with others. “Headache” is the daily news show, with a comedic edge. The other shows on-air include “Our People,” “First-year Hijabi,” and “How to be a Role Model”.

In addition to entertaining its audience, the station also works on spreading awareness and empowering women. Amany thinks that women in Arab and Muslim societies sometimes bear responsibility for the injustices they face. “I am not trying to regain rights,” she said, “but what I believe in is that women themselves are responsible for giving up their own rights when they believe in the notions that view them as second-class citizens. This feeling may have resulted from the beliefs and the teachings in the society they were raised in. In our station’s programming, we stress firmly the fact that a woman is not different from a man in her rights and duties.” The radio station and its audience represent a growing desire among Arab women to counter such notions by articulating their individual perspectives.

A Jordanian man has been jailed for seven-and-a-half years for killing his married sister in what he said was an act to save the family’s honour.

The man strangled the 16-year-old after she refused to explain absences from her marital home, the court heard. It emerged she had seen a female friend.

The sentence had been reduced as her family decided not to press charges.

Jordan has been criticised in the past for giving lenient sentences in so-called honour killing cases.

Such offences have in the past carried sentences as light as just six months.

Around 15 to 20 women are murdered each year in Jordan, often by male relatives in the name of family “honour”.

Conservative Muslim and Christian Egyptian families, have their daughters circumcised as a means to preserve their chastity. Recent studies revealed that about 90 per cent of Egyptian women have been subjected to the practice.

In June, the health ministry banned doctors and nurses from carrying out the procedure. The announcement followed the death of an 11-year-old girl in Upper Egypt as a result of the procedure. Medics who carry out circumcisions may face imprisonment and being stripped of their medical licenses.

While al-Badri argues that the practice is necessary in curbing women’s sexual inclinations, women’s rights activists and physicians disapprove of his view.

“Many of the circumcised women who seek our help were traumatised having no ability to lead a normal sex life, which affects their relationships with their husbands,” said Nihad Abul-Qomsan, head of the Egyptian Centre for Women’s Rights.

“No one of the sheikhs coming up with such arguments has ever considered in his agenda the deteriorating socio-economic conditions we are undergoing,” she noted. “Instead they try to play the role of the Islam advocates.”

Egypt’s top Islamic and Christian authorities were quick to voice support for the ban, saying the practice had no basis either in Koran or in the Bible. “The constitution is based on the Islamic sharia law, which does not stipulate FGM, giving a wife the right to enjoy sex with her husband,” Khalil Mustafa Khalil, who holds a masters degree in FGM legislation, told the independent al-Badeel newspaper.

In the 1950s, the Egyptian government tried to stop midwives from performing the procedure, while allowing doctors to do so, in a bid to minimise the risk of families who insist on circumcising their daughters, doing so in unsafe conditions.

Public outcry followed the 1994 CNN television broadcast of the procedure being performed on a 9-year-old girl by a barber. The minister of health at the time decreed that female circumcisions should be performed only one day a week at government facilities, and by trained medical practitioners, only in the even that they failed to persuade the parents from going through with it.

According to the World Health Organization, FGM comprises all procedures involving partial or total removal of the external female genitalia or other injury to the female genital organs whether for cultural, religious or other non-therapeutic reasons.

Muslims and non-Muslim girls and women alike residing mainly in sub-Saharan Africa, including but are not limited to Egypt, Sudan, Somalia, Ethiopia, Kenya and Chad. A more minor form of the procedure is also undertaken in some parts of the Middle East and South Asia.

Late Monday night, one of those many conflicted Muslim teens died, succumbing to injuries she received at the hands of her own father, if the police version of events is true. Friends said the 16-year-old Mississauga teen, Aqsa Parvez, had enraged her parents by refusing to don a hijab, the Islamic headscarf worn by some Muslim women.

Canadian Muslims condemned the slaying, calling it an extreme and reprehensible perversion of Islam. But some said the cultural clashes that reportedly precipitated the killing – a teenager’s rebellion against her strict, devout father – are playing out within Muslim families across the country and must be addressed.

“This is a wake-up call for law enforcement to tighten its grip on incidents like this,” said Farzana Hassan, president of the Muslim Canadian Congress.

“The atmosphere is unfortunately there for something like this to happen again. People from back home are coming to Canada with these very rigid notions of religiosity that makes them do these things – that enrages them to ensure compliance to such an extent.” Ms. Parvez’s friends told reporters the Grade 11 student would wear a hijab on the bus to school and change into Western-style clothing after arriving at Applewood Heights Secondary School in Mississauga. The family infighting over her dress had become so intense that Ms. Parvez temporarily moved out of their two-storey Mississauga home in September, friends said.

Ms. Parvez’s father, Muhammad Parvez, 57, appeared in a Brampton, Ont., court yesterday, charged with murder. Her brother, Waqas Parvez, 26, is charged with obstructing police. Police have so far refused to say how Ms. Parvez died.

The tragedy appears to be an extreme case of the cultural and religious clashes that roil many families in Canada. “So many girls are trying to live a faith-based life within a larger secular society,” said Ausma Khan, editor-in-chief of Muslim Girl magazine. “They are trying to fit in with friends and stay true to Islamic values. It can be a struggle.”

Frustrated parents often phone Saudia Azeez of the social services department at the Islamic Foundation of Toronto with issues that face all parents of teens: missed curfews, slacking grades, too much time spent with a boyfriend, or pregnancy, Ms. Azeez said. Other conflicts are more culturally specific. “It’s unrealistic expectations sometimes,” she said. “Parents come to a country and there’s really the illusion that their kids are going to be just like them.”

Seeking help can be difficult, Ms. Azeez said, because parents may feel ashamed, or don’t know what services are available. There’s also a need for programs geared specifically to minorities to accommodate language and cultural needs, she said.

In the past, that shame has led to murder – sometimes called “honour killings” – in other countries, but cases are rare in North America. A court in British Columbia convicted Rajinder Atwal of murder in the July, 2003, stabbing death of his 17-year-old daughter, Amandeep, who died shortly after she moved in with her non-Sikh boyfriend, whom she had been dating secretly.

There have been several high-profile cases in Europe, including the death of 20-year-old Banaz Mahmod, whose father and uncle were given life sentences in London this summer for killing the young woman whom they believed had shamed their family by leaving her marriage and finding another lover.

Tarek Fatah, the outspoken founder of the Muslim Canadian Congress, said this type of violence against women will continue until certain religious leaders quit pressing young woman to wear headscarves.

WORLDWIDE outrage has rightly greeted reports that Saudi Arabia’s “justice” system recently sentenced a young woman, gang-raped by seven men, to 200 lashes for being alone with a male friend who was not related to her through blood or marriage.
We stand with and commend the actions of decent people like Nancy Cunningham of Halifax, who has launched a letter-writing campaign in support of the Saudi woman persecuted under her country’s misogynistic, oppressive system.
Sadly, such gender apartheid practices in the Middle Eastern kingdom are nothing new. Under that nation’s arbitrary, discriminatory laws – based on an extreme interpretation of Islam, Wahhabism – women are routinely denied the right to vote, drive, study or work in certain fields and, of course, have their personal freedom to move about often sharply curtailed by the requirement that they be accompanied by appropriate male guardians.
In this case, Saudi justice officials claim that in 2006, the then 19-year-old woman, dressed provocatively, was involved in an adulterous tryst with an unrelated man in a car; she and her partner were then kidnapped by seven men at knifepoint and sexually assaulted. Her assailants received between 10 months and five years for kidnapping. She was sentenced to 90 lashes for being with a man unrelated to her. When she spoke out in the media, denying the allegations, and her lawyer appealed, a vengeful Saudi court suspended the lawyer and upped her penalty to 200 lashes. Her attackers’ sentences were also increased, to between two and nine years.
The international reaction has had some effect. Saudi foreign minister Saud al-Faisal called the ruling a “bad judgment;” the case is to be reviewed by the judiciary. But there’s little doubt such actions come only as a result of widespread condemnation of the sentence, as the case itself reflects the discrimination women and girls face daily in Saudi Arabia.
The greater shame, however, is that it takes such incidents to rouse Western leaders to denounce the ongoing reality of brutal gender apartheid – a term used to describe what’s happening to women in many nations – in Saudi Arabia.
Most of the time, there is only silence, and the sickening spectacle of Saudi Arabia as a member of the UN’s new Human Rights Council, defending its despicable treatment of women in the kingdom as an internal, religious matter.