An Untamable Voice

In the midst of a rock-star-style tour of American cities arranged by Code Pink organizer Medea Benjamin — who reached all the way up to Hillary Clinton to secure visas for a delegation of Iraqi women marking the third anniversary of the U.S. invasion at a series of anti-war protests — Faiza Al-Araji, a Baghdad water engineer and blogger (afamilyinbaghdad.blogspot.com), found herself on the beach in Santa Monica with hundreds of local protesters. Inside a frame of flag-draped coffins, with white crosses marking a grid on the sand, the crowd shaped itself into the symbol of a goddess and the words "Women Say No to War." One woman suggested, for ceremony's sake, that Al-Araji place a flower on a soldier's coffin.

"Why should I do that?" Al-Araji asked. "They killed my people!"

Yes, she sympathized with the grief of a mother who spoke about losing her son, a Marine, but added, "You know what is the meaning of 'Marine' in Iraq? It means 'murderer.' 'Murderer!'"

A vocal powerhouse of a woman with no shortage of hand gestures and facial expressions, Al-Araji tells how two compatriots, who had lost their children and husbands to American fire at a military checkpoint, were denied entry to the U.S. for the Code Pink tour on the basis that they had no compelling family reason to return to Iraq. In a recent blog entry she writes: "People are in grave pain and sadness, saying that these are the worst days since Baghdad fell. These are the most dangerous stages, and the darkest for us."

The stories Al-Araji has heard, along with her own experiences of life at the most violent edge of U.S. foreign policy, have led her to develop certain impressions of Americans. When bombs started to rain down on Baghdad in March 2003, she remembers going to a flower shop to buy roses "because I wanted to be happy in the last moment of our lives."

Yet the Americans she's met stateside haven't conformed to her expectations. She never thought the people who'd eventually help her would be mostly secular and mostly Jewish: Amy Goodman, Medea Benjamin and the Santa Monica Jewish ladies who have financially spearheaded the Westside anti-war movement. Al-Araji even refers to her host for the L.A. leg of her trip as her "Jewish mother."

"There is something strange in this country," she explains. "The people who have commitment to Christianity are aggressive, while the people who have no commitment to religion speak in humanity language. We believe, as Muslims, [that the] message of Jesus was peace. I can't imagine there is a Christian who is war maker."

After the war started, Al-Araji went through the trauma of having her son kidnapped by Iraqi authorities. He was released, but because of security concerns, she and her family recently migrated to Jordan, part of the brain drain that has been emptying Baghdad (the Arab capital of education before the war) of its scientists and professors, many of whom have been specifically targeted by death squads in what Al-Araji terms a "war of civilization."

For Al-Araji, the contrast between the before and after of the war is particularly strong regarding women's rights, one of the ideals America was to bring to Iraq. "The Iraqi woman had the right to study, to work, to drive, to choose her husband, to participate in politics," she says, using up all her fingers as she makes the list. "What do you think you can bring me more than this?"

I've heard this line of discussion before — my mother often talks about how, during her teenage years under Nasser in Egypt, college enrollment was 50 percent female, even in the sciences, but when she went to university in England, her architecture class had a ratio of 300 men to just three women.

Al-Araji goes on to say that she is incensed at the pity expressed for Muslim women in heart-tugging oppression stories. "A Muslim woman has the right to keep her last name," she points out. "If I take the name of my husband like in the West, it means I belong to him."

She has special ire for the Iraqi feminists that President ?Bush has paraded around at speeches as his proof of Arab female liberation. Meeting Iraq's former U.S. ambassador, Rend Al-Rahim Francke, was, Al-Araji says, "like putting poison on a knife in my heart."

And while Al-Araji has been impressed with the verve and courage of female leaders like Benjamin and Cindy Sheehan, with whom she demonstrated in D.C., she says she feels sorry forthe women here. This, after she saw Sheehan and an Iraqi-American woman pushed up against a glass wall by security guards when the demonstrators went to pay a visit to, as she says with sarcasm, the "beautiful John Bolton."

"In this culture, they don't respect the women. In our culture the woman is like a piece of glass — the Prophet Muhammad said so. He said, 'Take care of the vases.'"