Welcome to ‘Eyb, the newsletter in which I write frankly on topics that growing up as a young Arab woman I would be told were shameful, or ‘eyb. I also write about current affairs affecting girls, women and marginalised communities, as well as sharing my latest work and reading, watching and listening recommendations.
If you are a recent subscriber, a huge ahlan wa sahlan, or welcome, to you!
Last summer, I wrote an article for The New Arab about a wave of murders in the Middle East in which men killed women who rejected their romantic advances and marriage proposals, ended engagements, or asked for divorces.
Several news stories last week reminded me that this is a growing trend of femicide that unfortunately is not slowing down.
In Croydon, South East London, a 17-year-old girl was stabbed to death on her bus ride to school when she rejected flowers from a boy. The fact he had a knife on him means that he had already planned to react with violence should she reject him.
And in Egypt, three cases of femicide have taken place in the space of less than a week, in which one woman was fatally shot by her colleague for refusing his marriage proposal, a second was gunned down by her ex-fiancée for ending their engagement, and a third woman was stabbed to death by her ex-husband after finding out she had started a new relationship two years after their divorce.
Women are used to men reacting with aggression after rejecting their romantic advances - men will send us messages putting us down, mocking our appearance or threatening us with violence, and it’s become normal for men to stalk and harass us in reaction to rejection.
I’ve been on the receiving end of this aggression many times. Here are just a few examples that stand out in my memory…
When I was 17, living in Qatar and studying for my A-Levels, a boy in my class asked me out and I said no. For weeks afterwards he mocked me in front of our classmates and would harass me by doing things such as pushing my pencil case and books off my desk onto the floor as he walked by, and aggressively pulling me onto his lap in front of everyone. It stopped after I spoke to the deputy head and he made him apologise to me.
During that same year a male Qatari student who I rejected pinned me against the school corridor wall with a plastic chair and everyone around him laughed.
And once in my early twenties, while crossing the road, a young Qatari man shouted his number out to me from his car window. When I ignored him, he threw an entire bottle of water at me which hit me on the back. I was so shocked that I burst into tears.
In this Glamour article from 2019, a psychotherapist explains that men react to rejection with aggression as a natural defense mechanism to guard their masculinity and that when their masculinity is challenged - i.e. by being rejected by a woman for a date or marriage - they tend to fight it as a way to “re-prove their manliness.”
But what can we say of today, where the new normal has become women being genuinely afraid that if they reject a man, it will cost them their lives? How do we explain that?
American feminist writer Jessica Valenti, rightfully terms these murders as “rejection killings” as authorities sometimes place these cases of murder under the umbrella of domestic violence; however many of these woman weren’t living with their murderers, and may have only been on a couple of dates with them and some may have not even been on a date with their murderer at all.
Rejection by women is also behind many of the mass-shootings by incels that have taken place in America as well as right here in the UK in last year’s mass shooting in Plymouth.
We always try to explain men’s violent and aggressive behaviour with psychology. And while psychology absolutely plays a part, I sometimes feel like it’s a get-out-of-jail-free card used in mainstream media, as if there always has to be some psychological explanation or justification for the way men react to our rejection of them.
The truth is, it all has to do with many men’s genuine belief that they are entitled to us. That they should have whatever they want. And the belief that if they can’t have us, then they will make sure that nobody can.
What I’ve been writing…
I had so much fun interviewing screenwriter Kaamil Shah for The New Arab about his itv horror-comedy Count Abdulla, about a Muslim vampire working as a doctor in London. Read my feature Being a Muslim Vampire is complicated and watch Count Abdulla for free on itvX.
It was recently the first year anniversary of Kurdish-Iranian Mahsa Amini’s death while in custody in Iran for wearing “improper hijab.” In this in-depth piece for The New Arab I speak to Iranian women - activists, artists and journalists - about where the Woman, Life, Freedom movement stands one year on. Read Grief to action: The Woman, Life, Freedom movement one year on.
What I’ve been reading…
What was the last book you read that when you had to put it down and continue with daily life you longed to go back to it? For me it's Evil Eye by Palestinian-American author Etaf Rum, who wrote A Woman Is No Man. A Woman Is No Man was deeply impactful for me, especially knowing that it was an autobiographical novel like my own book and how similar Etaf’s life experiences have been to my own. I couldn’t help but try to draw parallels between this new book and the little I know about Etaf’s current life and I can’t wait to interview her this month and find out if I’m right!
Evil Eye is about Palestinian American art-lover Yara, who lives in North Carolina with her husband Fadi and two daughters. Everyone around her tells her how good she has it in comparison to her mother, who was once an extraordinary singer but never got to make anything of her talents after marrying Yara’s father, moving to America from Palestine, and having to rear Yara and her siblings. Her mother believes she was cursed and that’s why her life turned out the way it did.
When Yara has an altercation at the university she works at with a racist colleague, she’s forced by her boss to attend therapy and unlock all the painful memories she has of the way her father mistreated her mother and in turn the way her mother mistreated her.
Yara is forced to accept that she is affected by generational trauma and that it has a role to play in her disintegrating marriage. She starts to believe her mother’s curse has been passed down to her, until she finds the strength to take her life into her own hands. I resonated so much with Yara’s feeling of wanting to be more and aspiring for more, as well as her greatest wish for things to be different for her own children.
Finally, if you enjoy my work and want to support me, consider buying a copy of my semi-autobiographical novel, Hijab and Red Lipstick, published by Hashtag Press.
Longlisted for The Diverse Book Awards 2021, Hijab and Red Lipstick is a rare insight into what life is like as a young Arab woman growing up in the Arab Gulf. Find it on Amazon, Waterstones, WH Smith and Blackwells.