Awad - Beyond Veiled Clichés

Arab women, like people everywhere, are full of hopes and ideals Seekers, change-makers, ground-shapers. The future is in our hands.

As someone who has a foot in both the Western and Arabic worlds, Amal Awad set out to explore the lives of Arab women, in Australia and the Middle East, travelling to the region and interviewing more than sixty women about feminism, intimacy, love, sex and shame, trauma, war, religion and culture.

Beyond Veiled Clichs explores the similarities and differences experienced by these women in their daily lives work, relationships, home and family life, friendships, the communities they live in, and more. Arab-Australian women are at the intersection between Western ideals and Arab tradition. It can get messy, but there is also great beauty in the layers.

In a time of racial tension and rising global fear around terrorism, there is a renewed fear of the other. At its heart this fascinating book normalises people and their experiences. The breadth, variety and beauty of what Amal has discovered will enthral and surprise you.

I was in the Dubai desert, traipsing across hard earth, below a night sky that was clear and bright. It was past dusk but the temperature hadnt dropped as much as Id hoped it would. In a small desert camp, I navigated low tables and cushions that surrounded a large round stage; bar to the right, a shisha station tucked beneath a small tent to my left.

In the centre of it all, a man had taken to the stage to perform. He twirled sticks lit up with fire to a receptive crowd, their coos of approval splintering the quiet of the desert night. The people here had come for an authentic Bedouin experience, which was difficult to swallow given the camp is one of several, delivering the same substandard meals and glimpses into Arab culture to six hundred people a night, with nary an Arab to be seen. Even the belly dancer, an impressively curvaceous woman who could balance a sword across her bosoms while swivelling her hips, was not Arab. Of course not. While Arabs themselves have no qualms about propping up belly-dancing as a cultural delight, its steeped in hypocrisy because Arab women would never be employed to tantalise foreign men in such a way. And that apart, belly-dancing is, in fact, historically a dance of fertility, only performed among women not a dance of seduction. Yet its used to get bums on cushions now, and, apparently, to seduce men over chicken skewers and garlic sauce.

The staff were composed of expats from India, Pakistan and Asia. One man sauntered among the customers, a falcon perched on his hand, inviting them in a soft voice to stroke its head, achingly polite. Outside the main arena, two camels squealed as tourist after tourist hopped on for a thirty-second march in the sand. A few people crowded the small tent where shisha was on offer. Others made for the bar to get alcohol before they dived into their authentic experience.

My group was seated on cushions the way of the Bedouin and getting to know each other. As well as my husband, Chris, and me, there were two other couples a pair from Canada and a husband and wife from India, who had with them their infant son.

Chris watched me approach, with a sympathetic look. Any luck?

It wont dry, I said. I was trying to keep my forearm level to stop the dark brown henna painted across its inside from dripping down and turning the swirls into a stain. In a normal setting, henna dries in twenty minutes and you scrape it off to reveal an elegant pattern of flowers. But here, in the heat of the desert, it was refusing to. I sat down. I didnt much like the idea of this place, but henna always seems like a good idea and I figured it would be a consolation prize. But I felt ill at ease, and I wasnt quite sure why.

Dubai is many things interesting, enthralling, unusual but its not a genuine glimpse of the Arab world. Thats not to say I didnt like it. But it felt more like a business centre dropped into the middle of the desert than the Middle East I knew. Its a world designed to encourage and promote the growth of ideas and invention. And its making great inroads in the representation of Emirati women in the workforce and in government. At the time of my visit, the UAE had eight female ministers in its thirty-member cabinet, and its ambitious 2020 Expo was being led by Reem Al Hashimy, another high-achieving woman. With its large expat community, many women are also active in the workplace. Laudy Lahdo, a Lebanese-Australian woman, is based out of Dubai as the general manager of Servcorp Middle East. She has found great success in her industry: in her first year working there, she won an award for manager of the year. So Dubai may have its critics, but arguably it is a place of dreams easier to reach than the US if youre from the East; attractive to Westerners for its financial benefits and imitations of Western life.

But my authentic Bedouin experience was quickly turning sour.

I had longed to touch the desert sands, and after a month of intense interactions and travel in the region, I wanted to have some fun with Chris. So Id registered us for this expedition of desert exploration. I had no idea at the time that trips like this in Dubai constituted an entire industry, so large in scale that the only variations between tourist providers was whether you paid more and got a bottle of booze thrown in.

It was a decision I was now questioning, despite the joy I had experienced earlier, feeling the coarse sand fall through my fingers, the rush of being in a wide space where sky and earth are all you can see. That is, if you could tune out the vehicles speeding past as they bashed into sand dunes.

How many trucks come through every day? Id asked our driver when we pulled over for photos, feeling a rising sense of unease. Everywhere you looked, a cluster of white four-wheel drives did their worst against mountains of sand, the echo of passengers excited yelps resounding in the humid air as the vehicles sprayed sand with every sharp turn.

About a thousand, hed told me, without skipping a beat. His four-wheel drive was parked alongside two others, all of which had the hoods up to allow them to cool down.

I quickly started to regret my part in this tourist procession. I didnt want to think about the environmental impact, the discarded glass bottles littering the earth around me. One thousand four-wheel drives polluting the desert sands daily, and the trash their passengers leave behind, are going to leave a footprint.

Did you hear that? I said to Chris. Its not One Thousand and One Nights , its one thousand and one jeeps.

Now, back at the camp, we were both ready to leave.

I was quiet in the car as we drove back to Dubai, deep in thought, trying to decipher what truly irked me. Eventually it hit me, staring out of the window at the procession of those four-wheel drives heading back into the city: the tackiness of the so-called Bedouin camp appeals to tourists because it is, perhaps, the only way they can digest the Arab world.