Caught Between Western Oppression and Islamic Fundamentalist Suppression, SOAS, University of London
Channel: SOAS University of London
Date: 2015-04-08

http://www.soas.ac.uk/lmei-cps | http://www.soas.ac.uk/lmei
This lecture titled "Caught Between Western Oppression and Islamic Fundamentalist Suppression" was given by Sahar Khalifeh at the Centre for Palestine Studies, SOAS, University of London on 5 March 2015 with the support of the Qattan Foundation.

More about this event: http://bit.ly/1N6IouX

At present, we Palestinians, we Arabs, we Arab women are caught between Western oppression and Islamic Fundamentalist suppression. We exist amid alarming intellectual, social, and political chaos. Things are out of joint and we are now threatened from two sides without knowing which is more brutal. On one side is the West, whose plotting, exploitation, and colonization are familiar to us; and on the other is the Fundamentalist Islamist movement which has blessed us with innovations throwing us back into an age of oppression and of the harem. Here the free, liberal, secular, scientific, but also colonial West, and there the inflexibility of an Islam that calls for resistance to the West and its concerns, but is blind to the sciences, to modernity, and to feminist and social emancipation.

Dr Sahar Khalifeh is considered the foremost Palestinian novelist, widely acclaimed for being the first feminist Palestinian writer, and for her "sensitive, economical and lucid" style. She is the most translated Palestinian author after Mahmoud Darwish. She established a line of Arab feminist political novels, which are masterpieces in both language and content. She is the one Arab woman novelist who is read in most if not all Arab countries, and she has followed the Palestinian struggle during the last three decades, identifying women's distinguished roles and the reality of their contribution; a reality that is often overlooked or ignored. She is a novelist with both a feminist and political mission, who has proven beyond any doubt that that she uses her tools in admirable manner.